This year, the Hoover Institution hosted its tenth annual Summer Policy Boot Camp, a week-long, fully funded program that brings top college students and recent graduates to Stanford University to engage with Hoover scholars and policy practitioners. Chicago Thinker Staff Writer Braeden Prunier and Editor-in-Chief Shubhaankar Gupta participated in this year’s edition of the program, occurring from August 10 to August 15 on Stanford’s campus.
The Boot Camp brought together students from every state and across the globe for seminar-style lectures on topics ranging from federal entitlement programs and government spending to immigration, healthcare, artificial intelligence, energy policy, and the great power competition. Every seminar was followed by a Q&A period, during which both Braeden and Shubhaankar were able to engage with the speakers. Afterwards, each day culminated with smaller TA breakout sessions to reinforce the material and give students the opportunity to extrapolate on or disagree with the speaker’s ideas. Notable speakers included Joshua Rauh, Steven Davis, John Cogan, and Valerie Ramey on economic policy; H.R. McMaster, Condoleezza Rice, and Stephen Kotkin on national security and great power rivalry; and Michael McConnell and Victor Davis Hanson on the courts and American politics. The program also featured keynote dinners with Jim Mattis and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. Christopher Phillips, President of the Chicago Thinker Foundation, served as a teaching assistant at the program.
The Boot Camp served as a unique networking opportunity, allowing students from top universities to create professional relationships that have persisted far beyond the program. Similar to Hoover itself, these relationships span the globe, with many students having already held reunion events in D.C., London, California, New York, Canada, Italy, and various other global political hubs.
The Boot Camp was co-founded by Scott Atlas, Senior Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Hoover, who studies the role of government and the private sector in health care policy. Dr. Atlas previously delivered an address earlier at the Thinker’s American Identity Summit. This year’s program also marked the Boot Camp’s tenth anniversary, celebrated with an evening of remarks from Atlas, Rauh, and Rice. Located on the campus of Stanford University and in Washington, D.C., the Hoover Institution is a research center dedicated to generating policy ideas that promote economic prosperity, national security, and democratic governance. Through programs like the Summer Policy Boot Camp, the Institution works to equip students with the analytical tools to engage critically with today’s major policy debates.