“Extreme teams have the time and outside perspective to think deeply and creatively about a concept. The organizational reality for us is that we need to move fast and execute efficiently, and this creates pressure to stick with “safe” ideas. We leverage the creativity of Extreme teams to explore totally new ideas and keep us thinking outside the box.”

“It's really inspiring to see the reach that something like Extreme can do with people. It's really a great example of academia at work, working to create change. It's really inspiring to hopefully see this new generation coming in with that vision that they can change their lives and transform their own realities and hopefully their community and country.”

“The Extreme community to me is a group of creative individuals who are here not to compete with one another, it's a group of people who are here to help serve communities. And so we're all here to support each other's projects and help develop a larger impact from the class generally, not just within our own work. And it's creative. We're in a studio together where we're all looking at each other's work and we're learning from one another, asking how they're using certain tools and how we might develop from those tools.”

“I’ve never had an experience like this before where not only have I been able to work on a project for an extended period of time, but being able to immerse myself in the community that I’m impacting through the project by being able to actually travel there and talk with dozens of people was really impactful. I’ve never had that depth of immersion in any project before.”

"Today, when so many things can be done with AI (which means we will have a proliferation of product builders who outsource their thinking to AI), the techniques you taught us at Extreme can be a superpower: to develop a human understanding of the stories of people we are building for AND to create a human understanding of the business (BMC and Stakeholder mapping)"

"It is hard for me to see this program as anything other than wildly successful. It trained me, and over 800 other students in human centered design, and gave us the incredible opportunity to work hand in hand with community groups in Costa Rica to make meaningful change in people’s lives. I learned how to manage partner relationships, navigate conflict on fast-moving teams, and developed engineering judgement for working under tight cost constraints. It is an experience and skillset that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. A successful program might be the one that has been institutionalized, but it might also be the one that tests new frameworks, sparks uncommon conversation, and lays the groundwork for others to build. True success changes culture and the “rules of the game”. What starts out as a disruptive idea, disseminates and becomes part of the bedrock of frameworks of thinking, eventually negating the need for the original program. I believe that this is the impact that Extreme has had at Stanford and beyond."

"The passion and the effort and the thoughtfulness behind everything from lesson plans to the trip planning to finding partners around the world was deeper than any other class I’ve ever taken - it’s no small task to plan these things down to the minute or to set up a course culture that goes far beyond the call of duty as a staff (or volunteer!) and you’ve clearly changed the trajectories of hundreds of students and thousands more in vulnerable communities around the world - the knock on effects of your creativity and commitment are tremendous. On a personal note, I just started my work in Ghana - in the first meeting I led, I started with a stoke and followed with a sticky note brainstorming activity which landed well and I now consistently find myself thinking about what it means to engage communities in the way y’all described - the lessons of the classroom both big and small have already made their way beyond the course for me and I’m sure I’m not the only one here with similar reflections."