Winter Intern Capstone Conference – MaP Your Future

Each winter and summer, McGladrey hires hundreds of interns across the country to provide real work experiences to college students. Our goal is for them to take those experiences back to school to compliment their collegiate studies. One component of their experience with us is attending an intern-focused developmental conference.

On January 14th, we welcomed the arrival of 77 winter interns, representing 5 of our 16 markets, for our first ever Winter Intern Capstone Conference – MaP Your Future. We have held similar conferences for our summer interns, but this was our first chance to expose our interns to the frigid weather at Q Center in St. Charles, Illinois, in January (over night temperatures dipped in the negative teens with wind chills at 40 below zero)!

Over the course of our 2 + days together we took our interns on a journey to explore themselves and who they want to become, both personally and professionally. We heard from Steve Tait, McGladrey’s President and Kimpa Moss, our Chief HR Officer, about their career paths and perspectives on growth and development. We also discussed such thought provoking topics as “Career Equity”, “Leading from the Edge”, “Circle of Control” and “Living with Purpose”. One highlight was our discussion on Pure Instincts, which uses the Kolbe Index to help students understand how they process information and risk, instinctively. By understanding their Kolbe scores, our interns were provided another powerful tool to help them on their journey.

The new element at this conference was the introduction of project teams. Our interns were divided into teams of five to eight people each and asked to address business issues facing the accounting profession.

After the students presented their project team results, we celebrated with awards for the best solution in each of 3 categories. Frigid temperatures outside were no match for the warm memories and laughter shared when the conference was concluded with a slide show recap of the week’s events.