Five hardworking members of The Attic Youth Center last week wrapped up a summer internship that they say has made them workplace-ready.
The group spent the summer interning at Independence Blue Cross, whose Pride Committee worked with The Attic to organize the program. The interns, who range in age from 18-23, each spent 35 hours per week, for 10 weeks, working in five separate IBC departments: treasury, training, technology, marketing/sales and wellness/community health.
About three months before the internships, which were paid positions, started, staff at The Attic launched a “Step Up” class for interested candidates, in which they coached them on professional development and other aspects particular to the internship. About 20 youth participated.
“We hoped it would be a competitive process and it did end up being so, in a good way,” said Attic program coordinator Tara Rubinstein. “We wanted to see who would stick it out with the program, who would show up most regularly and rise to the top. A lot of them really came prepared having thought about the work from the previous week. We had them work on a networking speech and I was really impressed to see how much a few of the youth had thought about it in the intervening time period and the time they put into writing down changes and coming back ready to share their thoughts.”
At the end of the workshop, IBC staffers held two rounds of interviews before the final five were selected.
During their time with the company, the interns were able to sharpen technical and administrative skills, as well as learn about networking and personal branding through a professional-development course.
“We’ve done similar workshops here at The Attic but having these classes in this professional context really resonated with them,” Rubinstein said. “It gave them the opportunity to reflect on what is professionalism and how can you best succeed in the professional world.”
Rahsaan Galloway, 20, a 2014 graduate of the High School for Creative and Performing Arts and a culinary-arts student at Community College of Philadelphia, worked in IBC’s treasury department.
His duties included inputting checks into the company’s payment system, managing payments and distributing them throughout the company’s departments.
Galloway said his biggest takeaway from the experience was the importance of every person on a team in a corporate environment.
“Everybody’s part is important,” he said. “In the whole process of putting money into the system, everybody who worked on it — whether you were organizing things or doing more complicated work — nobody’s job was any more important than the next person’s.”
Rubinstein said that’s a lesson that she believes will continue to resonate with the youth as they make their way through the workforce.
“One of the things I felt as a mentor is that it seems to me like they don’t even realize yet all the things they have learned and that when they go back to college or their next job, it’s going to become more and more evident how much they gained from this experience,” she said. “Even the relatively simple operations that they did were able to show them how each task in a professional setting plugs into the bigger picture. I think they’re going to keep seeing the benefits of this internship experience unfold.”
Galloway, who aspires to one day open his own business, such as a restaurant, said he’s eager for other youth to have access to internships such as these.
“I want to help other kids like myself get the opportunity to work in an environment like I did,” he said. “Whether it’s a corporate workplace or a more social-focused one, it’s an experience that brings out the best in people.”
Rubinstein said the IBC internships are expected to be available again next summer.