This question arises time after time, as I try to explain, using examples, what happened, which parts I was brainwashed in, who affected my life and how much information could be crammed in a day.
In Remco Bloemen’s words: ”It’s like getting a ticket to the chocolate factory”.
The first weeks were a mix of exponential technologies and global grand challenges, and the rest was time for team projects, in which we were asked to impact a billion people positively within the next ten years in one or several of the Global Grand Challenge areas:
Simple. Well, under that was quite a woven net of site visits, talks, after hours workshops, lab, offsites, lessons, debates, discussions.. a day seemed to last at least a week, a week a year. No joke they told us in the start that the program is equivalent to 2,5 yrs of university ed. Not to mention all the knowledge classmates shared.
On the SU Graduate Studies Program website you’ll find three videos explaining the different phases of SU GSP, explained by fellow participants!
After 5 weeks, we were taken to Yosemite national park for an offsite team building. We were supposed to identify the people we wanted to work with and on what by the time we came out. And despite the convergence workshops, speed dating, interest aligning, etc, it all happened unbelievably organically – within a week before and during Yosemite we had a class full of teams, of perfectly balanced knowledge-experience-speciality composed workforces. And we got to business.
We had four weeks time to build projects. We were taught entrepreneurship and best practices, we went out to see customers and mentors, we worked in labs and even flew out of the US, reached out to our networks within and outside SU. The results were staggering. At our internal presentations, my jaw dropped. I left my classmates alone for four weeks (it was impossible to keep track of people’s progress unless they were in an office next to you) and then they came up with a working test for various cancer types? Or a new way to lab grow in-vitro meat?
I can’t even begin to describe the projects. Here are all our 2min video presentations (made in the last week fyi). Please glance through them. http://singularityu.org/graduate-studies-program/2013-team-project-videos/
It’s post SU and I’m suffering the blues. I miss all my classmates and the feeling we had as a collective: pushing each other forward. Everyone wanted to see each other succeed and people took time off their own projects to support others, and at the same time ”kept up the pace”, keeping us all focused on our mission.
There’s a magic in SU and the whole Bay Area that keeps you focused. You know sky is the limit – you get where you reach.
(Though sometimes you don’t. Then you too can go to Burning Man, find new energy and make something new. Burning man is full of the most creative people around. Michael Levitt, the winner of the most recent Nobel in Chemistry is a burner, and they had made beautiful art for this years burn with his wife. Not to mention all the other whiz kids and technology influencers.)
I hope we can keep that Empire State of Mind in all of us, everywhere. In a truly global world, which we are building, it can’t be places that make the difference. It’s the people. So see to it that your colleagues or friends to your left and right are the ones who support you and want to see your happiness – in life and work.
There’s no secret sauce, and really no free tickets. You need an inspiring, innovative, open-minded (and open-ended!!) environment, cram it full of intelligent and driven people with good hearts, show them what is going on, what’s to be fixed and why. Give them examples, truth, a tray full of all kind of help and a network at hand, and don’t interfere. Then future happens.