By Merna Soliman, Political Science graduate with a specialization in International Relations and a double minor in Economics and Global Affairs and Public Policy, American University in Cairo
I signed up for the Entrepreneurship Exchange Program somewhere between finishing my bachelor’s degree and figuring out what came next. It sounded like a good way to spend the summer. The first few weeks were an exercise in humility. Coming up with a viable idea sounds simple until you are in a room, a virtual one, with people who see the world differently from you. A problem I see in my home country of Egypt is perceived differently in Morocco or Libya or the U.S. What feels obvious to me is a blind spot for someone else, and vice versa. We spent more time than I would have expected just trying to understand each other before we could even start working together. At the time it felt slow but looking back, it was the most valuable part.
I came in with ideas about what entrepreneurship looks like and what a good pitch sounds like. My teammates had different answers to those questions.They were not wrong, they were just shaped by different realities. Learning to sit with a perspective that does not mirror your own and find the insight inside it rather than the friction, is something no module can fully teach you. It has to be lived.
The people I met through this program were very thoughtful. Students juggling coursework, jobs, family, and still showing up to a 9 pm call because the team needed them there. That kind of commitment raised my own standard for what showing up actually means.
What we built together, our final pitch,was shaped by all of our contexts and all of our blind spots and everything we learned from colliding into each other over eight weeks. That felt like more of an achievement than a polished deck ever could.
I am a political science graduate with a deep interest in development and how systems can be designed to include people they have historically left out. This program gave me a new language for that. Entrepreneurship, I realized, is just structured problem-solving with other people and the quality of what you build is driven by the quality of how you listen. That is something I want to apply to my next role, whether it is working in development, policy, or continuing to build ideas that respond to real gaps in real communities.