photo by steed media service

Although the Thurgood Marshall College Fund has helped scores of HBCU students realize their college goals by awarding them with scholarships, the fund’s CEO and president, Dwayne Ashley, still felt that the 19-year-old organization could do more. “I recognized that we were graduating these students, many of them first-generation, who didn’t know how to navigate putting together a résumé or applying for a corporate job. You can’t take for granted that people just know these kinds of things,” he recalls. “We need to do a bit more than the scholarships.”

To address that need, Ashley created the Leadership Institute, which helps guide potential graduates through résumé writing, networking and navigating the corporate maze. While the program has been successful, Ashley still felt like there was more that could be done. “We were only serving about 600 students in the Institute, but there are over 235,000 students who attend our schools. I said, ‘we have to be able to reach more people,’ ” he explains.

His instincts led him to pen the book, Dream Internships! ..., which provides tips on securing internships. “I took a lot of the information that we were giving in the Institute and put it into the book,” Ashley says.

Ashley’s advice to those seeking an internship is to be willing to work for free. “Kids today have got to realize that they may not get a paid internship, but it helps them to get their foot in the door,” he says. -ivory m. jones

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