2020 has easily been the craziest year of my life so far. With a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic as the backdrop to my everyday functions, I wondered how my immediate future would pan out. Upon my acceptance to the program, the global climate had shifted further, leaving me pretty hopeless that I would be able to participate in the program as I had hoped. To my surprise , I received an email from the program team informing me that the entire program would become a remote experience. Although I was delighted to hear that news, I wondered how an immersive study-abroad program would shift to become fully remote in such a short span of time. The answer to that question? Seamlessly.
The two parts of the program—the boot camp-like class experience and the complete internship experience—allowed me to make the most of a summer that was originally filled with uncertainty. Here are some highlights of my experience:
The Class Experience
After just my first class in May, I knew I was in for a great six weeks. The first thing that caught my attention was how smooth the learning process was. It seems difficult to teach a 40+ person class on Zoom while at the same time allowing for active participation and thoughtful discussion, but the teaching team made it look easy. With an alternating cycle of lectures from the head teacher Byron and breakout room sessions with the five teaching assistants, the content was always discussed, analyzed, and practiced in ways that were invigorating and insightful.
Another thing that I noticed was how committed the teaching team was to making sure every student had a solid grasp of the material and was coping well with remote learning. Because South African time was 5 hours ahead of Eastern Time, it wasn’t uncommon to see Byron teaching new concepts at 10 pm in his time. Because the five teaching assistants were located in the U.S., it was easy to hop on a Zoom call with one of them to discuss the day’s learning and homework.
Of course, I can’t discuss the class experience without talking about my classmates. I had the pleasure of meeting many students from across the United States, Europe, and Asia. To interact with so many people with different backgrounds and experiences was one of the greatest joys of the program. I even met students from my own school who I had never met before!
The Internship Experience
As a student in the Management Consulting course, my internship experience revolved around using hypothesis-driven analysis and a plethora of problem solving approaches to help a South African business. Going into the program, I didn’t know that my tasks would involve speaking with CEO’s, founders, and managers at South African businesses large and small or making comprehensive issue trees that outlined just about every potential avenue a business could explore to enhance business operations, but that’s exactly what I did. Although my team did experience challenges such as losing a team member at the beginning of the internship and keeping a five-hour time zone difference in mind whenever we set up a meeting (of which there were many), we learned more than we could have imagined in just a month of work. We were grateful to have worked for a client who was a former manager at a well-known multinational company who could teach us about the South African business landscape as we helped him develop an investment fund for small food and beverage businesses. By the time the internship was over, my team was able to present a full pitch that covered the global and local market landscapes of the food and beverage space, the unique opportunities that were available to our client’s investment fund, and a working operating model for the investment fund, as well as 20 slides worth of research. Throughout the entire process, we had the help of our teaching team , which frequently organized career-relevant and remote-learning-oriented events to further ensure a productive and healthy experience.
I can easily say that applying to the program was one of the best decisions I have ever made, and I am sure that the lessons and content that I learned over the program’s six weeks will stay with me for a very long time. Everyone from my classmates to my teaching team to the staff helped me make the most of my remote summer experience, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for the program.
