Daily Life I was lucky to be in a stable home with a healthy family and plenty of space, but I also think that the structure of the boot camp helped make it easier to work at home. Perhaps because of the shorter-than-usual duration (4 weeks) the work was intense in a good way and the programme was highly structured and synchronous. The majority of the time was spent on calls, but these were usually interesting and high-energy, so I very rarely felt Zoom fatigue. The boot camp was excellently structured. I didn’t have to stay up late to work in Utah time because University Impact has Associates in Cape Town too. What this meant was that we had different groups within the whole cohort and would operate on different schedules to accommodate time differences. Most participants were recruited from Brigham Young University (Utah), the University of Pennsylvania, Oxford, and the University of Cape Town (UCT). Our Oxford-UCT group started at 10am or 11am UK time with group time and investment research. The US participants then started early in their morning and joined our group in our afternoon for training and the guest speaker. After that, the US groups would have their group and research time in their afternoon. We did some presentations across multiple groups and they arranged some inter-group discussions and networking sessions, as well as taking on board our (daily!) feedback as we went through. We were officially done by 6pm on each day, although occasionally we chose to start earlier or work later. There was a lot to do in a short space of time, which was overwhelming for some people, but I really enjoyed the intensity of the boot camp, it was a bit like a more structured Oxford term, only half as long, faster-paced still, and with different deliverables. In hindsight, I would have reduced my schedule before and after each day. As it was, I had a lot of video calls with friends, dozens of 1-on-1s with people from a global online conference, several interview chats with students applying for our new InsideUni Oxford team, and internal calls to discuss who would be best suited to the different roles on that team. I actually really enjoyed this fairly intense schedule, but I think I would have been more able to go above and beyond in my contributions during the boot camp if I had taken on less and got a little more sleep.
154
