Andrés Figueredo graduated from The English School in Bogotá, Colombia. He completed his studies at the Universidad de La Sabana in Bogotá, Colombia and at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. He currently works as a development and project manager.
My main motivations for pursuing the IB DP were advice from my older sister and brother (who are graduates of the programme) as well as sage advice from my parents. I think that it was the best decision, and I will also try to motivate my children to pursue it in the future.
I decided on my future career during my last two years of the DP. Knowing firsthand about my father’s experiences as an engineer motivated and inspired me a great deal. He helped me understand that industrial engineering offered multiple opportunities for developing myself, and this was what stood out to me the most, since I’ve always been a curious person. I am interested in a lot of aspects of knowledge, and the IB helped me complement them better. The IB subjects that I took were social and cultural anthropology, Spanish, physics, English and mathematics. They were very useful when I was undertaking my professional studies in industrial engineering and marketing and logistics administration.
“I am interested in a lot of aspects of knowledge and the IB helped me complement them better”.
I think that the integration of all the DP academic disciplines enables students to develop important skills: languages are an incredibly important foundation, as are physics, computer science and mathematics, which were essential for my career. Social and cultural anthropology, theory of knowledge (TOK) and creativity, activity & service (CAS) are the foundations of human understanding, critical thinking and social action, which are all related to my daily work as a businessperson. Sports, exercise and health science and other extracurricular classes created small habits that I think are necessary and fundamental foundations for any human being. I currently play sports a few times a week and that is partly thanks to the programme, where I not only learned about different sports but also made me want to practice them actively today.
CAS provided me with social keystones that will stay with me forever. CAS created important links between the business world that I am involved in and the desire to have a positive effect on society. I try to use the ideas from CAS to guide my organization and other similar entrepreneurial projects. TOK helped me develop the important habit of questioning the world around me, and I have complemented this with spiritual and personal experiences.