Idea London - Mustafa Khanwala, Engineering with Finance MSc

London is one of the world’s most inspiring and exciting cities and attracts students from around the world. As the political, business, legal and cultural capital of the UK it also offers important practical advantages to students.

Mustafa Khanwala

I came to UCL because I wanted to explore a more commercial side of engineering. My degree and related work experience helped me to do that. I got to build a strong network through guest lecturers and voluntary work I did in tech accelerators through helping my professor.
I ended up starting my own business right after my degree. Being a student at UCL was very beneficial, not just because of what I had learnt in my degree, or the contacts I had made, but also because of the support from UCL Innovation and Enterprise. This included gaining a Tier 1 Graduate Entrepreneur Visa and winning the UCL Bright Ideas award. Our UCL connections also got us our first trial store and got us involved with Cisco, who championed us into IDEALondon - a start-up incubator, which is also partly run by UCL. I also used UCL’s very good makespace in the Institute of Making, which is amazing for prototyping new inventions.