Business Minor Spotlight: Aidan Heggerud — An Update from Zurich to New York
...When we last spoke with Aidan Heggerud, he was midway through a Winter 2026 exchange at ETH Zurich and had just joined AMZ Racing, the top-ranked Formula Student team in the world. We promised a follow-up when he returned to Toronto. The return route, as it turned out, ran through New York.
ETH Zurich: from case studies to a real client
Heggerud describes the exchange as the most demanding and most useful term of his degree.
"ETH is an incredible institution, and the opportunities I had there were huge. It moves at a different pace — the ceiling on what you can attempt is very high."
The centerpiece was a consulting-style project course sponsored by UBS, run like a real client engagement: a defined scope, regular check-ins with the bank, and a final presentation with a live demo. Heggerud was project lead on a small ETH team working on a real problem from UBS’s risk group: a global bank has thousands of clients to watch, and emerging risks — inflation, energy shocks, geopolitics — need to be spotted before they show up in market prices.
His team’s answer was an early-warning prototype with a clever twist: don’t read prediction-market odds as forecasts — watch how fast the odds are moving. Flag the statistically significant swings, then use an LLM to map each flagged event to the specific clients it could affect, producing a ranked alert feed that tells a risk officer where to look first. It was built entirely on public data; no client information was involved.
"In the original article I called IMI400 the scientific method applied to business. This was the same thing with a real client — frame the problem, test it, defend it in the room. Except this time the room was a global bank."
AMZ Racing: a seat at the front of the grid
After several seasons with the University of Toronto Formula Racing team in driver development and race engineering, Heggerud joined AMZ Racing — and got behind the wheel. As part of the team’s driver selection, he drove the AMZ Racing car himself.
"Driving a car built by a team at that level tells you very quickly where you actually stand — as a driver, and as an engineer. You feel every decision the team made."
AMZ went on to an incredible season, finishing at the top of the Formula Student leaderboards. And the semester abroad came with one more item off the motorsport bucket list: a drive on the Nürburgring, the legendary German circuit.
From race engineering to AI-driven investment research
Midway through the exchange came an offer he describes as impossible to turn down. Since July 1, 2026, Heggerud has been working as an AI-Enabled Investment Researcher at Cerberus Capital Management in New York City — the same firm where he spent three summers as a student.
The role sits at the front of a broader shift in the investment industry. Traditionally, a junior analyst’s early years are dominated by the mechanical layer of the job — the financial modelling, the presentation-building. AI is increasingly able to handle that layer, which lets analysts spend more of their time on the substance of investing. Heggerud’s focus is investment research: helping source ideas and supporting the diligence that tests them, with AI tooling woven through the workflow.
"The standard for the quality of your work is very high, and the feedback is immediate. There’s no faster way to find out whether all that training in deciding under pressure and uncertainty actually stuck. It did."
The venture he built during the Business Minor, SectorOne, has taken a back seat to the new role — but the lessons from building it haven’t.
What the Business Minor is doing for him now
Asked what has held up five months on, Heggerud returns to the same distinction he drew in March.
"Computer Science taught me to build. IMI taught me to decide. In this job, almost nobody is asking me whether something can be built. They’re asking whether it’s worth building, what it’s worth, and what happens if we’re wrong."
His advice to current Business Minor students: the open-ended assignments are the point.
"In school, most problems have an answer at the back of the book, so you learn to keep polishing until you find it. At work there’s no back of the book. The IMI courses where the answer wasn’t clear and you had to become a real team with people you’d just met — that’s the part of the degree I use every day."
What’s next
If the original article was a story about keeping options open, this one is about what happens when one of them answers. Heggerud is planted at Cerberus, where he sees a long runway ahead. One thing hasn’t moved since March: the long-term ambition to compete in motorsport.
To keep pace with Aidan Heggerud, you can watch his lap of the Nürburgring, or connect with him on LinkedIn.
To learn more about the Minor in Business, Science and Entrepreneurship at IMI, please visit the website or contact imi.businessminor@utoronto.ca.
