WASHINGTON, D.C. – Brianna Davis, a 21-year-old finance major at Howard University, says she has been to her share of educational conferences, but none quite like the newly inaugurated UNCF Student Leadership Conference.
“I’ve been to different conferences in different corporate settings where we had executives speak with us, but not on the level that we got here,” Davis said during the final day of the UNCF conference, held May 30-June 1 at George Washington University and the tenth-floor office of Booz Allen Hamilton, a global strategy and technology consulting firm.
Davis and 33 other UNCF scholarship recipients were selected to attend the conference in order to better prepare them for the internships they are set to work this summer at a variety of firms and organizations.
Davis’s internship will be at Pershing LLC, a firm that provides business solutions to financial institutions.
The internship experience is one that Davis says she will be able to better maximize because of the various lessons imparted at the UNCF Student Leadership Conference.
“We got more of the ethical side of the business, a lot of the nitty-gritty things that we need to do well in our internships,” said Davis, explaining that the advice she got helped her resolve some of the conflicted feelings she had about working in the financial services industry despite its reputation for being predatory.
A Diverse writer was invited to sit in on some of the sessions where African-American senior associates and principals at Booz Allen Hamilton shared information, tips and occasionally candid personal advice on how to navigate the corporate landscape.
