Imagine this: you have been accepted to one of the top Ivy League universities in the States, but your course is just not good enough.

While you might be studying law, or engineering, you don’t know the first thing about coding or consulting.

So what do you do? You pack your bags for the summer vacation and spend it in Cape Town, taking part in a two month intensive ‘boot camp’. Founded by Aaron Fuchs and Darren Kramer over two years ago, here’s the story about iXperience, thanks to TimesLive:

The South African mechanical engineer [Fuchs] studied at Yale and ended up as a hedge fund manager on Wall Street. He wanted to “reimagine education” by teaching courses “relevant to the career space” but not taught well at colleges, with a focus on technology and consulting.

The idea is to accelerate their careers by giving them one month of an intensive camp – classes in their respective fields – followed by a month on-the-job training.

“It seems strange, but it is actually true, iPhone app development is not actually taught in universities in the US , and there are not many places that teach it. The other big attraction of iXperience is that they [students] get to spend two months travelling abroad , and that is very appealing to a lot of students. So it is the combination of learning this incredibly valuable skill and also travelling .”

All the lecturers happen to be industry specialists in their fields, like Yash Singh, a management consultant from consultancy firm Accenture. He took two months off to teach, “to show students what it is actually like in the industry”.

With the aim of turning iXperience into a fully fledged university, Fuchs claims that the ‘boot camp’ currently contributes $25-million (about R325-million) to the Cape Town economy.

And better yet, to give back, five local students are sponsored to take the course, which costs $8 500 (R130 000), allowing them to not only pick up skills, but integrate with international students.

[source : timeslive]