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by
Dan Perkins
Craig
Dean has always been interested in education and
in 1994, he joined the board of Big Shoulders,
which provides financial, scholarship and
mentoring support to the Catholic Schools in the
neediest parts of inner-city Chicago.
It
was a prestigious appointment, but Dean quickly
discovered that he wanted more hands-on
experience with an educational institution.
The head of Big Shoulders introduced Dean
to several Big Shoulders schools, but he found Holy
Trinity
High School
the most intriguing.
Dean
was struck by the fact
that although Holy
Trinity did not have the advantages that other successful parochial
schools have, it was doing
what he felt all of educational institutions need
to do. "Holy Trinity takes the kids that are out there,
not just the superstars, and educates them,"
said Dean who is a partner
at AEG Partners, a Chicago-based turnaround
and crisis management consulting firm.
“Here
was this school that didn’t seem to have a whole
lot of prominence, but it was doing an outstanding
job without great funding sources," recalled
Dean. "Year after year, ninety-plus percent of the
graduates of Holy Trinity were going on to higher
education."
Dean
quickly joined the board of Holy Trinity High
School and immediately began
taking steps to help sure up the school’s
financial base.
The idea for the Friends
For A Future Program came later that year
when Dean was invited to speak at the school’s
annual Career Day, a day when professionals from
different vocations talk to Holy Trinity students
about their professions.
At
the time, Dean was president of Bank America International
Investment Corporation.
He thought it would be interesting to share
with the students what he did to help build the bank’s
investment portfolio of companies in
Latin America.
Looking
back on the experience, Dean is convinced he lost
most of the students the moment he began
talking. “How
do you communicate something like equity
investments to a bunch of high school kids?”
asked Dean. “I
don’t have any kids and I wasn’t use to
hanging around high school kids, so knowing how to
talk with them was not my strong suit.
I handled it like a business meeting and
probably went into too much depth, too quickly.”
Dean
did not lose everyone.
At the end of his talk, a student raised
his hand as asked, “Mr. Dean, do you do your job
out of an office or out of your house?”
The
question took Dean by surprise.
“It never occurred to me to even address
a question like that in my presentation.
It really stunned me because here were
these students attending school in the shadow of
downtown Chicago
and they didn’t have a clue as to what went on
there.”
After
answering the question, Dean began thinking about
the students and their need for greater exposure
to the professional world.
As
Craig reflected upon his own upbringing, he
realized his parents had exposed him to a great
deal. “My
father was an engineer and worked in an office.
I would go down and visit him periodically.
It was a natural kind of exposure that
caused me to think about going to college and
about a professional career; not necessarily
engineering, but a career nonetheless.”
That
recollection prompted Dean to think about
establishing a summer internship program that
would provide the students of Holy Trinity with
the kind of exposure to professional
work environments that he had had as a teen.
The
more he thought about it, the more Dean wanted the
students to have more than mere exposure.
He insisted upon the students having real
jobs. “Businesses
often assign summer interns to receptionist
positions, mail rooms and filing jobs, or they
create “make-work” projects for them,
especially when the interns are high school
students,” said Dean.
“I was not opposed to the students
performing some menial and mundane tasks; after
all, those are real aspects of the work place, but
I wanted the students to have substantive
experiences as well.”
Dean
asked a colleague at Bank of America to help him
think through the various iterations of the
program. The
process helped Dean to design a program that would
occur between students' junior and senior
years. “One
of the things we wanted was opportunities to follow-up with the students.
If the program admitted seniors there would
be no formal way to review their experiences with
them. We
also wanted each student to have a mentor.
The mentor could be inside the company or
outside, but the mentor would be somebody the students
could turn to and keep in touch with.”
The
Friends For
A Future was designed to run 9-to-11 weeks,
depending on the student and the employer.
Unlike many summer internships, Dean wanted
the students to have a paid work experience.
Students would receive a fair wage
(currently averaging $8.00 to $8.50 per hour). At
the end of the internship, Dean wanted employers
to conduct a formal review the students’
performance. If
a student performed well on the job, Dean
wanted the employer to pay $1,000 in the form of a
scholarship to meet the student’s tuition and
program administrative costs.
Once
the elements of the program were defined, Dean
submitted his plan to school administrators, and
it was quickly and easily approved.
By
the summer of 1995, Dean had five companies that
agreed to provide summer internships.
He knew the
key to his success was finding someone in the
corporation who was willing to be an advocate for
the Friends Program within their company.
“That is the way we built the program,
from the ground up,” said Dean.
“Once we found the right person, and they
had contact with the students, we didn't get many
turn downs.”
During
the first year, the program exceeded expectations
and that initial success provided the motivation
to expand the program to include more companies
and more students.
“It turned out fabulously.
The kids were outstanding.
The work they did was great, and at the end
of the day, the thing that really made the program
go was how good the kids were on the job,”
recalled Dean.
Success
occurred on many levels.
Dean recalled the experience of one student
who interned at a law firm.
The student’s supervisor was very
impressed with the quality of the intern’s work,
but didn’t realize until nearly the end of the
summer that the intern was a high school student,
not a college student.
“That was a positive
surprise for us,” said Dean, “but more
importantly, at the end of the summer, the intern
decided that she didn't want to be a lawyer.
She had a front row seat and the
opportunity to observe what went on in that kind
of environment and decided that it was not what
she wanted. Rather
than viewing her decision as a disappointment, we
view it as a big success.
Here was a young person who could have
spent a lot of time hoping to be in a career that she
ultimately would not have had much interest
in.”
Such
experiences form the basis by which the program is
judged.
“It’s really about the development of
the students,” declared Dean.
“We measure that mostly by what the
teachers at Holy Trinity tell us about the
students when they return in the fall.
Those changes are dramatic in terms of
maturity, responsibility and how the students
carry themselves.
Almost universally, teachers tell us they
can identify the kids that have gone through the Friends
Program. It
really is a life changing experience for the
kids.”
Dean
appreciates how difficult it is for many students
to go straight from school into an environment
where they have to work five days a week, forty
hours per week.
“Occasionally we have a student who is
unable to complete the program.
The mentoring helps a lot and we have
become much more sophisticated in how we prepare
the students.
Now, we recruit students and have
orientation sessions to help the students learn
how to interview and manage the demands of the
workplace.”
Although
there are many positive components of the Friends
Program, for Dean, the most important aspect is
the students.
“Bank of America has participated for the
last seven years because they have had a good
experience. The
Friends
Program tries to anticipate the needs of the
corporation in order to make their participation easy.
Holy Trinity prepares the students by
making sure they know how to interview, behave,
and dress for a professional environment.
The school also provides mentors to make
sure the students don’t get lost.”
Dean
credits Brother Phil Smith, the president of Holy
Trinity, for embracing the program and taking it
to a higher level with the Corporate Experience
class. Brother
Phil teaches the class, which orients prospective
interns to the realities of professional work
environments.
“Right from the outset, Brother Phil was
extremely supportive and made sure we had the
resources we needed to move forward.”
Dean
would like to see the Friends
Program double in size.
“Right now, we have roughly 25 students
participating in the program out of a junior class
of over 100 students.
I would like to offer the training and
experience to a lot more students.
They are qualified, and they can do the
job. The
biggest constraint for us is making sure we can
offer the students quality job opportunities in
the corporate world.”
Although
an uncertain economy has made it more difficult to
find new corporate participants for the Friends
Program, Dean is optimistic.
He knows Holy Trinity students can be great
resources for any corporation willing to give them
a chance.
The
End
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