For one week in November 2025, Universidad de los Andes stopped feeling like a quiet campus and turned into something closer to a tech fair. During Colombia’s Innovation Week 2025, the big star was not a celebrity, it was Bogota’s first metro line.
From Nov. 10 to 14, students, professors, alumni, and companies walked the same corridors to talk about tunnels, stations, and apps. The question behind most conversations was simple, how could this megaproject help build a better city.
A week where the Bogota metro became the classroom
Semana de la Innovacion 2025 took place at Uniandes and Uniandinos. The Civil and Environmental Engineering Department acted as host and chose the Bogota metro construction as the central theme for talks, fairs, and workshops.
Instead of treating the metro as something distant, the event turned it into a giant teaching case. Teachers and students used drawings, models, and data from the line to connect theory with what was actually happening in Bogota.
Many student projects looked at topics such as environmental impact, noise, traffic changes, and new business opportunities around future stations. The metro served as the thread that tied different disciplines together.
ExpoAndes and La Muestra, where students owned the stage
Two of the most crowded spaces were ExpoAndes and La Muestra. In ExpoAndes, first‑semester engineering students presented more than 100 basic, but very creative projects, often their first serious contact with building something from scratch.
La Muestra gathered over 90 teams from mid‑career engineering and science programs. Their proposals usually went deeper and sometimes included real data, maps, and models related to the metro or to urban problems linked with transport.
Both fairs took place in the Calle del Saber of the Mario Laserna building. Stands lined the corridor and turned it into a long gallery where visitors could stop, listen, and ask questions about each idea.
For many students, this week was their first big test of communication skills. They needed to explain complex topics in a few minutes, convince strangers, and show that their prototypes or simulations actually worked.
When companies, experts, and students sat at the same table
Semana de la Innovacion 2025 also created formal spaces for contact between academia and the productive sector. Desayuno con Empresarios (Breakfast with business leaders) brought business leaders to campus to listen to student projects and share what companies really needed.
This meeting helped both sides. Firms discovered fresh approaches to issues such as monitoring structures, reducing construction waste, or managing data, while students saw how their classroom work connected with concrete problems and job paths.
Technical sessions, including a talk on PHC piles in Bogota metro line 1, linked local works with experience from other countries. Guests explained design choices, risks, and lessons learned in similar rail projects.
Hearing from metro line 1 representatives and international speakers gave students a clearer picture of the scale behind each decision, from soil studies to passenger flow. The metro stopped being just a headline and became a network of real challenges.
Pitch Day and awards, where ideas faced tough questions
Toward the end of the week, Pitch Day brought the best teams from La Muestra onto a stage in the Mario Laserna auditorium. Each group had only a few minutes to present and defend its idea in front of a jury.
The panel usually included professors, industry experts, and innovation professionals. They asked detailed questions, from costs to social impact, and offered feedback that helped sharpen both the technical part and the storytelling.
Awards for Semana de la Innovacion recognized the strongest projects from ExpoAndes and La Muestra. Winners gained visibility on social media and the faculty website, and some left with new contacts for internships, research, or possible startups.
Training city‑shaping engineers, one project at a time
Seen from outside, Semana de la Innovacion 2025 looked like another university event with stands, posters, and prizes. For many Uniandes students, though, it became the moment when their work felt big enough to touch a project like Bogota’s metro.
By turning a megaproject into a hands‑on learning tool, the university helped form engineers who thought about environment, mobility, and communities at the same time. That experience would stay with them long after the first metro train started running.