About 200 soon-to-be college seniors will descend on Oak Brook on Friday and Saturday to attend the annual conference for Inroads Inc., a non-profit career development organization that places minority students in business and industry jobs.
The two-day conference will bring together African-American, Hispanic and Native American students who are in their third summer of an Inroads-sponsored internship, both to network and to acquire more business and communication skills.
To be held at the McDonald’s Lodge on the fast-food chain’s corporate campus, the conference will be Inroads’ first regional gathering for college seniors. Last year’s event, held at the Arthur Andersen Professional Training Center in St. Charles, was a national affair involving more than 800 seniors.
Adam Stanley, a senior this fall at Washington University in St. Louis, has been an Inroads intern since he began college. A native of the city’s Southwest Side, Stanley interns at ABN Amro Bank in Chicago and hopes to get a permanent position there.
“The goal of Inroads is to permanently place its alumni at a sponsoring company,” Stanley said. “That’s what we’re working toward throughout our four years.”
Like many Inroads interns, Stanley has worked in many different departments at ABN Amro in keeping with Inroads’ goal of learning as much as possible at a company. But Inroads’ other meetings, held throughout a students’ tenures as interns, prepare them for every aspect of the corporate world-from professional writing to business sophistication.
Additionally, said Jill Gilmer, manager of training and development for Inroads, interns usually are assigned to a mentor inside the sponsoring company. The mentor program helps share “the unwritten rules of a company’s culture,” Gilmer said.
