From the ASP to AI

Emily Blundo ASP’15 shares how a summer at St. Paul’s helped spark a career at Microsoft.

BY KRISTIN DUISBERG

In her six years at Microsoft, Emily Blundo ASP’15 has steadily advanced through roles that have taken her deeper into the world of product engineering. Fresh out of college in 2020, she took a role as a customer engineer, supporting clients who were learning how to implement Microsoft Teams in the many remote workplaces that emerged during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. From there, she moved into several product manager roles focused on customer data and security, serving most recently as a senior product manager working with clients and industries across the globe. Earlier this month, Blundo stepped into a new role as a feature product manager, responsible for designing a new Copilot tool and working closely with Microsoft engineers to execute and deploy that design.

If her career path has been an impressive one, it’s also not one Blundo was considering when she matriculated to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for college — or when she spent five weeks in 2015 on the St. Paul’s School campus as a student in the Advanced Studies Program Engineering class the summer before her senior year at Moultonborough Academy.

“The St. Paul’s program was huge at my high school,” Blundo recalls. “We always knew that the kids we looked up to in the grade ahead of us were going to the St. Paul’s program, so it was top of mind for me to apply and try to get the opportunity to go. I was passionate about school and always eager to explore new interests, and I knew the ASP would give me that opportunity.”

A strong math and physics student, Blundo says the ASP Engineering class introduced her to new aspects of science education she hadn’t previously known even existed. “There were hands-on labs that we did, and I’d never done any hands-on engineering labs,” she says. “It was the first time I soldered. It was the first time I had done anything with CAD.”

Blundo’s experiences outside of the classroom were a revelation, too. A top runner and Nordic skier at Moultonborough, she learned to row on Turkey Pond — and enjoyed the sport so much she swapped cross country for crew her first fall at RPI. It was her first time living in a dormitory, and her first time interacting with a group of peers significantly larger than the 50 or so students who made up her high school class. “It really introduced me to what the college experience could be like,” she says.

At RPI, Blundo spent her first two years as a mechanical engineering major but found herself more interested in understanding the math behind engineering problem-solving than the discipline itself. Her junior year, she switched to applied mathematics, trusting that her interests would point her to the right path. “It was just a feeling of, ‘If I’m passionate about this, I’ll find somewhere to put my passion,” she explains.

That instinct was validated when a recruiter from Microsoft reached out to Blundo the fall of her senior year, having seen her profile on LinkedIn. Barely a week later, she flew to Dallas for a day of interviews with the company and left with a job offer.

Last summer, Blundo returned to the ASP to participate in a career panel during Alumni Day that also featured venture capitalists David Hornik ’85 and Chris Winship ’92 and research biologist Dr. Elizabeth White ’96. It was the first time she’d been back on the St. Paul’s School grounds since her ASP graduation a decade earlier, although it was hardly her first reconnection with the program. She’s stayed in touch with a group of friends she made during her summer at SPS, and one of her Engineering classmates, Sierra Blondeau ’15, ended up being her roommate at RPI from sophomore through senior years — and a bridesmaid when Blundo and her husband, Andrew, were married last year.