Steven Novick is a 3-2 student at Tepper, who has interned twice at Microsoft during his undergrad at Carnegie Mellon. I remember chatting with him over lunch when he was at admitted into Tepper about his (then) potential journey through bschool immediately upon graduation. He wrote in very excited about his RLE experience, shared below:

As I sit here writing this almost a week after returning from RLE, I suddenly realize how much time and energy has been put into Project Firenze by not only myself, but hundreds of students over the past month and a half.

For my team, this paid off last weekend when we were welcomed to Microsoft by many Microsoft Executives and other leaders who gave up their Sunday to spend time with us. We were immediately thrown into unique situations. We were given a new case and only five hours to come up with a solution to pitch to Norm Judah, the CTO of Microsoft Services.

What was unique about this however, was that each team was given a GM and an HR Manager to help us learn about how to work better as a team. During the day, my team built a great relationship with our GM (Rick) who helped us when it appeared we were stuck.  His feedback and suggestions were extremely useful, not only for the event, but for the future team experiences. At the end of the day, we had one-on-one meetings with the GM and HR manager and were given candid feedback about what they saw about us that would be helpful (and what we need to improve) in the future.

As a former intern at Microsoft (Program Manager), I know that the RLE showed the best of what Microsoft had to offer. During my entire summer at Microsoft, I had full access to my GM, and probably met with him for a total of 2.5 hours over the entire summer. To have close to 8 hours of direct contact with a GM was absolutely incredible. Rick definitely exemplified what Microsoft is all about.

The whole experience definitely lived up to the slogan, "Expect Great Things". Every aspect of this competition was GREAT. I made great relationships with my other team members. I learned about GREAT things. Microsoft showed me once again what a GREAT company it is. The best part was coming back from Redmond and telling everyone at Tepper about how GREAT Microsoft is!