August 12th, 2022 was the day I left home in France without knowing when I would be coming back. This was the hardest day of my entire life. Saying goodbye to everybody, moving to a place I knew nothing about, being 18, alone, and in a country where I did not speak the language (I mean, my level of mastery wasn’t the same)...this was frightening! Even though I was so sad, I will always remember that feeling of freedom. I wish everybody could feel it at least once. After a very long journey, I finally got to Pittsburgh.
Let’s talk about school in the fall semester. I took mostly marketing classes. I always liked marketing but if I'm being sincere, I took them because I didn’t want to take tough classes. By this I mean tough to understand. However, I did a project in an entrepreneurship class and I loved it. I mean, when I first looked at the syllabus, I was disappointed. I wanted to know how to launch my business here, not how I can become a YouTube influencer. This class was useful though. I learned how to use Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro, and I discovered that I really enjoyed the group project.
My experience made me feel more comfortable branching out and trying classes in areas I wasn't familiar with. Thus, I took a design thinking class, a supply chain management class, and a strategic management class. It was during my design thinking class that I met Erikah, my LaRecette Randall competition team member. We started to chat during an in-class group project in February. Before that, we didn’t notice we were in the same group in the strategic management class! Erikah asked me where I was from and what I would like to do in life. I told her that once I am back from the U.S., I will be a junior and would want to launch a company, but I didn't know what that would be (let alone look like) yet. Then, she told me that the application for the Big Idea Center's Randall Family Big Idea Competition was open and asked me if I wanted to do it with her. I didn’t even hesitate!
My Randall Family Big Idea Competition Experience
Regarding our Randall team, we were originally three of us, but one had to resign due to professional conflicts. Initially, it was tough to think of an idea as it felt like everything had already been done before. I don’t exactly remember where our idea came from, but I do remember loving it. Our idea is to create an app that helps to address food waste and maximize savings by offering personalized meal planning, cost-friendly grocery options, and a recipe finder all using smart technology solutions.
We also struggled to find a name up until two weeks before the final round of Randall. It was originally called MealMate but we noticed that that name already existed. I wanted to use a French noun in the name of our app for managing recipes that’s better (in my opinion) than the French word for "recipe". Ultimately, we came up with LaRecette.
The LaRecette team: Noeline Hequet (left) and Erikah Cudjoe (right).
Erikah and I met every Tuesday afternoon and touched base with our assigned mentor on Sunday evenings. We decided to do the optional video round because we were confident in our creative abilities. However, we had some scheduling issues. I was in Canada the weekend before the contest and we fell behind because of our final exams, so Erikah ended up finishing the video alone. To help her, I wrote the speech for the part where she would put her voiceover. Erikah was an amazing teammate, and I was very impressed by her work and collaborative skills. Watch our submitted video:
When we saw that we made it to the final round, we couldn’t believe it! We were nervous but we also had many ideas. The things we struggled the most when preparing for our final pitch were time management and coordinating our schedules. The day of our final pitch was so stressful. We decided to start the pitch by entering the room with a cart and putting groceries bags on the table. I was so nervous that I started to forget my words during the presentation! That was so frustrating because I knew what I had to say, but the judges were patient with me. Erikah killed it, she was so at ease and comfortable. We were relieved once we finished and throughout the weekend, we thought about how we did and the upcoming awards ceremony.
When we arrived for the awards ceremony the next week, our anxiety quickly turned to excitement. When the Big Idea Center team started to announce the video winner and we saw that we didn’t win, we were kind of sad because we thought that was the only prize we would be able to win. But when we saw our picture appearing for the fourth prize ($2000), I cried tears of joy! Erikah was laughing, which made me laugh as well. We were so happy and couldn’t believe it. Last year, my biggest accomplishment was getting into Pitt. This year, it was winning fourth place at Randall.
Noeline and Erikah pose with their check for the $2,000 fourth place prize at the 2023 Randall Family Big Idea Competition.
Overall, the competition was an exciting and empowering experience -- I loved the fact that my team could handle everything on our own and we were free to do whatever we wanted to in terms of how our idea grew and developed. This independence was exactly what I was looking for. The Randall competition has been a unique experience that I would recommend to everyone.
Future Plans
While my goals for the future are clear in my mind, I’m not sure if they'll happen as planned. I’m sad about leaving the U.S. -- I would love to come back for my master's degree, but I would have to do so by getting a scholarship. There are some amazing, all-expenses paid scholarships out there, but they come with some difficult caveats. Instead, I want to do two things: a humanitarian mission and then launch a company in France.
First, I want to take a gap year during which I will participate in two humanitarian missions focusing on girls' education and the environment. Then, I would like to find a six-month internship ideally in Italy to become fluent in Italian. While I am doing my internship, I will start building the plans for my new company idea. Once my gap year ends, I will go back to school to launch my company: a coffee truck which will be inspired by the American culture I witnessed here. There will be coffee to-go, and I want to sell the classic beverages that are popular in the U.S. Then, I will try to get into Stanford for graduate school, but I'll also apply to other business schools in Europe and in the U.S.
Beyond that, I don’t really know what I would want to do, but I do know that I want to continue to create and innovate. I'd love to work either in the wine industry or at a bakery or hotel in some capacity. It'd be great to get opportunities to work abroad while I'm young, and then we’ll see where life takes me. Looking back on this year and looking to the years ahead, the time I spent at Pitt growing my passion for innovation and entrepreneurship will stick with me and I know it has set me up for a lifetime of knowledge-seeking and success.