From a small remote community in Northern Ontario to a Product Manager at Microsoft, Kyle Bimm has travelled a long, winding road — literally! Through it all, he still clearly remembers how he felt winning a Future Aces scholarship in 2014. “It was a fantastic, fantastic day, the best way I can say it”
Bimm, grew up in Atikokan, Ontario, more than 1,500 kilometres from Toronto, described as the “canoeing capital of Canada”. The community boasts a population of just over 2,600 people, according to its 2021 census.
“Coming from where I came from, a very remote community, not a lot of people going to big schools for S.T.E.M degrees – it was a very nerve-racking experience,” he recalls.
As a youngster, he noted a lack of positive, professional role models and limited opportunities for youth to set themselves up for success. Bimm, however, was not deterred. He was deeply involved.
The Air Cadets, Student Council, mentoring programs and Operation Christmas Child were among some of his volunteer activities. And all along the way, he strived to hone his leadership skills
“The scholarship was a really great boost of confidence for me that I actually deserved the place that I was getting,” he says. “And I think [it] really went a long way to making me feel comfortable and confident that I could do what I needed to do.”
To that point, the Microsoft brand had always been familiar to him. Sitting down at the family computer at age five, Bimm recalls being amazed at his family’s Dell Pentium computer and thinking to himself that technology might be what he wanted to pursue.
“We’d actually done a project in our careers course in high school, where we had to map out the next 10 years of our lives and what we wanted to do,” recalls Bimm. “The program that I said I wanted to go to was actually the one I ended up studying. Engineering science at U of T.”
Now living in Seattle, Bimm talks about how important it is to push through tough times and not lose sight of the ultimate goal. For him, it’s all about the marathon.“There are going to be a lot of bumps on the path to where you’re trying to get,” he says. “It is much more important how you respond to smaller failures or setbacks, than how you try to plan for them, or even, respond to your wins. The higher you’re trying to go, the more you’re going to feel it and experience it.”
While Bimm is happy in Seattle, every now and then he thinks about making an impact closer to home.“When I close my eyes and daydream about my future, I love the idea of being able to come back at some point and build my moonshot company in Canada,” he says. “I’d love to be the next Shopify on home turf. That would be fantastic.”
For current students, Bimm shares offers this advice: don’t pretend and lie to yourself that things are going to be easy.