Bobby Wade ’11 – Even with Wabash’s students scattered to the four winds, I’ve stayed busy at Career Services working on summer projects and planning events for the coming year. The Wabash College Community Fair has been one my main focuses so far, and will continue to be throughout July and August. The office is abuzz as this year’s Fair promises to be the largest one yet. Businesses participating include Dapper Dudes and Athens Nutrition & Smoothies. To prepare, Brady Young ’12 and I have been exploring the Crawfordsville community, contacting as many local businesses as possible and encouraging them to participate. We have mostly been met with enthusiasm for the event, and excitement to participate.  The Fair is slated for August 31, and I look forward to it with high expectations.

 

The next project on my summer agenda is revamping the website with a series of videos designed to help students become more familiar with Career Services and to offer them tips from alumni on every aspect of their career/internship search. Brady and I have already started interviewing both current Wabash staff and alums. In the coming weeks, a video compilation of our interviews with Tom Runge ’71, Greg Jania ’93, Joe Martin ’06, Boyce Evans ’08, and Richard Woods will be posted to the Career Services website. We are very grateful for the experiences and advice these men shared with us on how to excel in an interview and how to successfully utilize the alumni network. In the next month, I will be travelling to Chicago and Indianapolis to meet with Wabash alums and hear about their experiences in searching for internships and full time jobs after graduation. Expect to see a video featuring those interviews posted by August.

 

Another one of my summer priorities has been to update the suit room, located in one of the upstairs rooms at the Arnold House. Heather Hines, Career Services Administrative Assistant, Brady, and I spent the better part of three days sorting through the suits, shirts, and ties.  Finally, we organized everything into color and size order and uploaded each item onto a check-out software that will allow us to better track our inventory.   The suit room looks better than ever with fresh items ready to be checked out. If you have an interview, an internship, or need to look sharp for any occasion, stop by and check out the SuitYourself room.  

 

It has been a blast so far, and I look forward to what the rest of the summer brings. Be sure to check back to see the video interviews I’ll be posting in the coming weeks!

 

Brady Young ’12 – I have been given the opportunity to intern for Career Services this summer on the Wabash campus. Working here this summer has given me some incredible opportunities, one of which was our recent trip to Chicago. Late last month, we traveled up to Chicago to meet with alumni, go to an alumni event and a Chicago Cubs game. It was a great opportunity because my fellow intern Bobby Wade and I interviewed a few alumni for a video we are putting together as one of our summer projects as well as network with many alumni at the Chicago Cubs game event.

 

To start off our trip, Scott Crawford, Bobby Wade and myself had lunch with Derrick Yoder ’11 and Brian Mantel ‘93, who Derrick is interning for, and had a chance to see what they are both doing this summer and how the internship was going. After finding out everything is going smoothly we moved on to WP Global Partners where we met with Greg Jania ’93 and his Wabash intern, Jackson Ding ’11. We had the opportunity to interview Greg and talk with Jackson about what he does for his internship and we were lucky enough to get a tour of the office. Their offices are located 41 floors high and Greg has windows for his wall so we got to see an amazing view out over the town of Chicago. 

 

Following that interview and meeting we then checked into our hotel and had a few hours of free time before we had to head into town for dinner. Derrick and I are both preparing for another football season and since the hotel gave us a free pass to a Bally fitness center around the corner, we took full advantage and got a nice workout in before dinner.

 

For dinner we met with Tom Runge, Boyce Evans ‘08, Joe Martin ‘06, and Jackson Ding ’11 at Weber Grill. Before we went into dinner Bobby and I had a chance to interview Boyce and Joe and were able to get a lot of helpful information for out video.  After dinner Joe, Scott, Boyce, Bobby, and I went across the street to a nice bar to watch the rest of Game 7 of the NBA Finals that had been on. Did not quite end how we wanted it but it was a good game and it was a nice opportunity to sit down with these two young grads and talk about the Chicago lifestyle and how they liked it and to just hear good old Wabash stories. After we left there Derrick, Bobby, Boyce and I went out and had a nice night Chicago style.

 

The next morning I had totally forgotten about the time change and had intended on waking up and watching the USA World Cup match. Lucky for me, I only missed the first half. I was able to catch the second half and enjoy a nice comeback back the US and end the game in a 2-2- tie. 

 

After the soccer game we walked a little over a mile to Moe’s Cantina where the Chicago Cubs alumni event was taking place. There were a number of alumni and families that showed up for this event. It was great to see the kind of Wabash support that goes on in Chicago, and with the game on a Friday afternoon, I was amazed by the number of people who attended.  After about an hour and a half of talking with various alumni, we walked over to the Cubs game. I have been to a couple of Cubs games before when they played the Twins, (because my family is huge Twins fans so we tried to see them as much as we could), but it had been a good number of years since I had been at Wrigley Field. It has not changed a bit and is still an amazing baseball park. I was able to sit with and talk to Matt Schulz ‘06 for a good part of the afternoon and later talked with Brandon Weddell ’06. It was great to get to talk to younger guys again and hear what they have gone through and stories that they have about their Wabash days and now their days in Chicago. We decided to leave the game after the 8^th inning since the Cubs were getting spanked and we still had to walk back to the hotel and head home. We thought it was a good idea but it soon turned out to be an awesome decision.

 

That mile or so we walked to the park we had to walk back and at this point the rain that we thought might come during the game was looking more and more like it was about to happen. And sure enough it came on lightly at first but then pounded us, the entire walk back. I’m pretty sure you could tell we were from out of town because no one else was walking on the streets unless they had an umbrella. Everyone was standing under an overhead or in a building waiting it out but we did not really want to wait it out so we just started running. By the time we got back to the hotel we were obviously drenched from head to toe but thankfully we hadn’t packed our stuff away yet so we could change and not be soaking wet on the ride home.  Scott decided not to and was still soaked by the time we returned to Crawfordsville a good 4 hours later.

 

This is one trip that I am grateful to be an intern at Wabash because I got to see how alumni help each other out and networked with several alums who gave some great advice and it’s always nice to hear the Wabash stories they have, never gets old. Bobby and I will be returning to Chicago soon to interview more alumni for our project.