It was surely an interesting Friday evening when I found myself sitting in a board room with a number of CEO’s, Company Founders, talented professionals, and 12 participants, students and/or recent graduates just like myself.

I was extremely excited, as this environment reminded me of the show ‘The Apprentice’.  The venue, the tasks, the CEO’s and the short time frame for the challenge all made me feel as if I was living in that show. I had no idea who my other team members were or which challenge we would get.  I was put on a team with Mundeep Gill and Samrat Dhillon, and were assigned to the Benbria challenge.  We had barely enough time to introduce ourselves before starting the intial brain storming session on how best to tackle our new task.  We were given 10 seconds to come up with our team name, and the first thing that popped out my mouth was ‘GO’, hence the name ‘Team Go’.

We got down to business in the Carleton Prescott dorm rooms.  At first it was over-whelming to see the scale of information that needed to be researched before our final presentation in just 48 hours. My team and I decided to break things down to the bone and see what happened. It was unfortunate for me the first night, since both my team members preferred to work during the day, unlike myself, who is more of a night person. But this was reality, and we all had to work together.

Next morning on Saturday, after having a grand breakfast at the Carleton Cafeteria (ham, eggs, bacon, hash browns, just name it…yumm), we once again went back to brainstorming. It was a critical moment for my team; it was getting closer and closer to the deadline, but we still did not have a concrete solution. The pressure was building up, and so after a stressfull day we decided to cool ourselves, take a break and meet up the next day.

Now it was Sunday which was ‘THE DAY’.  We had 3 hours left and we had still not completed our presentation slides, simply because part of our final solution was still incomplete. I kept on asking myself what would happen – would the company CEO’s see us and just leave?  And not to mention what kind of questions they would ask us after our semi-finished presentation.  Talking with the other teams, it was clear they were afraid that they would take too long to present given the 15 minute limit. Our concern was how we would use the whole 15 minutes provided due to our unfinished results.

Then finally the words of wisdom started rumbling into our heads and a final strategy began to take shape – at once we knew what had to be done. I think we were working most efficiently two hours before our actual presentation. We were still short of slides and things to talk about, but at this point it was too late to discuss issues which would only confuse us further. So we decided to go with the flow and do the best that we could with the analyses we had conducted.  It was too late to change anything – it was showtime.