South Africa

For the iXperience internship, I will be working as a product manager for Barclays Aliens, the development focused, more start-upy arm of Barclays Africa Group Limited that works on moonshots - innovative projects that will launch the company forward and keep it competitive in the 21st century. Joining me are 3 consultants, Katherine, Leah, and Eric, 1 UX designer, Liza, and 1 web-dev coder, Phil. We are all being supervised by Alwyn Van Wyk, a Barclays veteran who started Aliens a few years ago. We received a brief last week about the project, but it was basically just a list of buzz words like 4th Industrial Revolution, Financial Inclusion, and Youth Employment Pipelines, so it was helpful to meet with Alwyn Monday morning and hear his description or what he is working on and needs our help with and ask follow-up questions. After discussing the projects and our backgrounds and interests, we split up into teams to tackle each of the 3 projects. The consultants will b...

This past Tuesday night, I checked another item off of my things to do in Cape Town list - see a live jazz show. Cape Town, and South Africa more generally has a pretty vibrant jazz scene, and I've been wanting to go to a jazz club, so I was excited to see "The Crypt Jazz Evening" show up on the iX calendar on Allcal. Wills, one of my friends I've met here at iXperience, is musical (he plays 4 instruments and has seen Yo Yo Ma in concert several times) has been wanting to see a jazz show as well, so together we made our way to downtown Cape Town, got ourselves a table at the Crypt, ordered a few beers, and enjoyed the music. When we first arrived, the house band was playing some low-key instrumental stuff, but over the course of the night 4 different groups took the stage. Their styles ranged from chill beats to loud, upbeat ragtime sounds, and included instrumental jam sessions as well as nice vocals. There was one American man named John (who vaguely resembled ...

In the first week of the Product Management course, we were split into groups of 3 and tasked with coming up with an idea that we would develop into a product over the 4 weeks of the class. I was partnered with LB and Driz, 2 girls from UVA who would turn out to be great partners, as we gelled immediately while some of the other groups faced growing pains and were stuck in the "storming" phase for a while. We decided to go with my idea that I have been thinking about for the last few months, an online platform that serves as the one-stop shop for recent college graduates going through the apartment hunting process. We called it RealWorld, a name I'm still not a huge fan of (I'm open to ideas!!) and pitched it to the class as a Pecha Kucha, a presentation style in which you present 20 pictures (no words) for 20 seconds each. It was a strange format, but helpful in thinking about the idea in a different way. We would be following Lean, Agile principles throughout...

Another weekend, another couple of exciting excursions. On Saturday, I joined Katherine, Michael, and some other iXers for a drive up Signal Hill and a jump off of it - we were going paragliding. It was a beautiful day, bright sunshine, clear skies, and no wind - wait, we needed wind. Yes, unfortunately, we picked one of the calmest days we have had here in Cape Town for paragliding. As a result, the girls (who weighed less) went first, which was totally fine, as Michael and I just talked and hoped for wind.    By the time we had gotten suited up and buckled in, the wind had started to pick up a little. My guide rushed me over to our takeoff position and we started running down the hill (after I almost tripped and faceplanted), and before I knew it we were in the air. It turns out that my guide had seen birds catching a thermal, a column of rising air, and was hurrying to make sure we didn't miss it. We did indeed catch it, and it carried us up above our starting ...

iXperience has hosted several professional development workshops covering a range of interesting topics that I thought I would share. The first was with Donovan Muller, a director at Accenture who has spent his entire 28-year career with the firm. He is helping out with the consulting class, and talked about "Career Planning in the Consulting Environment." He went over the different types of consulting, the role of entrepreneurship, and the pros and cons of big versus small firms. He also laid out the 6 key things that, in his opinion, determine how quickly you will get promoted: Core Competency, Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Personal Networks, Contribution to the Knowledge Capital, and Business Judgement. One interesting piece of advice Donovan shared on leadership is that one of the best ways to be perceived as a leader in a field is to get published and present at a conference, and he encouraged us to start writing. Next, Aaron Fuchs, the CEO of iXeprience, hos...

In between all of the exciting excursions and events in Cape Town, I have been making an effort to remember the city's and country's history, the history of racism and separation. A couple trips over the last few weeks have made that history clear, and the experiences of being in the places I read about in my "History of South Africa" course have been powerful. First off, last week I visited the District 6 Museum in what is today known as Zonnebloem. The museum serves as a memorial to the thousands of non-white men, women, and children who were forced to evacuate their homes and neighborhoods and relocate 30 kilometers away in the Cape Flats on the outskirts of Cape Town to make way for whites. After the evacuation, however, the government razed the area but failed to build any new buildings, and the whole space sat empty for years. We were lucky enough to be guided to the museum by Donovan Muller, a 28 year veteran of Accenture who is assisting with the iX Co...

After class on Monday, a couple friends and I decided to treat ourselves to afternoon tea at the Mt. Nelson Hotel. I had reserved a sitting for 6, but we were joined by a few others last minute and expanded our table to 9 - me, Bridgett, Eric, Rohit, Zach, Liz, Anna, Wills, Thomas. The Mt. Nelson is quite an upscale hotel, with a fancy lobby and dining area, but what captured our attention immediately was not the ornate architecture but the ornate desserts laid out on a long table in the middle of the room. Cakes and pies, cookies and macaroons, brownies and breads, and even Turkish delight, this table had every dessert imaginable, and it all looked delicious. We hurriedly dropped our bags, grabbed a plate, and loaded it up with our first round of treats. As we were gushing to each other about how good each piece was, the waitress came by and delivered our first round of tea, the Mt. Nelson house special tea. After another trip to the dessert table, the waitress returned with our ...

This last weekend I had two very different, but equally fun excursions that kept me busy from sun up to sun down on both Saturday and Sunday, culminating in not being able to keep my eyes open past 9 PM on Sunday night. The weekend started at 5:00 AM on Saturday morning with a bus to the Hottentots Holland Nature Reserve about an hour and a half outside of Cape Town for our zip lining excursion. My group was the last to go, so we had to wait in the cold reception room for a few hours while the other groups went through the safety training, got geared up in their harnesses and helmets, and made their way to the start of the slides. We passed the time trying (and mostly failing) to solve Mensa puzzles from a pack we found in the waiting room. Here's the one that had us stumped for the entire morning: Finally it was our turn, and the 7 of us loaded into the Jeep and made our way through the reserve. It was a bumpy ride (the driver described it as an "African massage" ...