What Did You Do This Summer? One Intensive Weekend for Two BICsters @ BBH Bootcamp

Once again, BICsters scored coveted slots in the highly competitive Griffin Farley Beautiful Minds Program. This summer’s participants were Iara Carmona ’18 and Keishel Williams ’19.

Created by BBH to honor Strategic Planner Griffin Farley, The Beautiful Minds program (GFBM) is a hybrid planning bootcamp and networking event. Participants in this highly selective program get a free crash course in planning from some of the top planners in the industry. 

This year’s brief was on behalf of Be My Eyes, an app that helps visually impaired people "to see." It connects blind people with volunteers around the world in a one-way video chat so they can get help with simple daily chores, such as finding out the expiration date on product labels or choosing the right color of socks.

Iara recapped the intensive long weekend as an opportunity for students and professionals to come together in teams to “create a campaign and communication strategy to increase US blind user numbers by 5 in 6 months. It was a BIG challenge to create a campaign with little to no visual elements. On top of that, we had to work with a group of people we had just met with only 24 hours to do the whole thing.”

Experiencing the planning process is not the only point of the 3-day intensive. Keishel explains that “as part of the bootcamp program, we were given tours of a few great agencies here in New York. While at Ogilvy, I specifically requested to speak with members of the Creative department while my fellow Planners spoke with the Planning team. I was introduced to a Senior Art Director and Senior Copywriter and was able to parley that brief meeting into some informal training under the Senior Copywriter.” 

As Iara summed up: “It was one of the most intense work experiences of my life. Very stressful but very rewarding at the same time.”