Entering the workforce after graduating can seem daunting, especially when you don’t know what the professional landscape will look like in the next five years.
Kelley Francis (BA, ’09, Spanish) is helping students from the Hispanic community prepare to make that jump while keeping an eye on the future.
Francis is the executive director of the HITEC Foundation, a national nonprofit organization that works with students who are interested in technology fields. The Chicago-based foundation provides scholarship, mentorship, and career development support, helping students from all majors look towards the future.
“At this point, I would say almost every major has some sort of connection with technology,” said Francis. “As we’re thinking ahead, technology is a component in basically every job moving forward.”
The foundation has provided more than $1.5 million in scholarships to date, with a total of 514 recipients and 100 new scholars for the 2025-26 academic year. They also recently ran a pilot program for high school students to help combat stereotypes about careers in technology.
For Francis, this is a crucial part of their mission: empowering students who may not have previously considered the tech industry to be a viable path for them.
“We work with them to build their connections and ensure that they see peers that either look like them or come from similar backgrounds and can support each other along the way,” she said. “The students we work with might not necessarily know someone in the field they want to go into. It’s important to have someone to say to them, ‘You can do it. Will it be hard? Probably, but you can do hard things.’”
Francis herself was on a different path initially. She studied Spanish and minored in business administration with a concentration in international business, initially intending to do corporate or government work abroad.
It was an internship opportunity that changed her trajectory—and her mindset.
“Professor Ann Abbott connected me to an internship through a program that she had started, called Spanish in Illinois,” said Francis. “Spanish majors were placed with nonprofit organizations throughout the state, and before that, I really hadn’t thought about nonprofit work.”
She was placed at the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (IHCC) as a freshman. She interned with them throughout her college career, until she was eventually offered a full-time role upon graduating.
“I was hemming and hawing a bit,” she said. “I really liked the work but didn’t want to be stuck. But every time I began to apply to other places, I just kept getting drawn back to the community-focused work of the IHCC—helping business owners grow and thrive in a changing environment.”
She stayed at the IHCC for the next decade, and it was there that she started seeing a shift to more tech-centric work.
“We started focusing on Hispanic tech companies and how they could get the same skills to grow,” said Francis. “At the same time, I was given the opportunity to run some of the efforts at the IHCC Foundation, where we were working with Hispanic high school students and exposing them to the world of entrepreneurship.”
She was eventually brought on to work at the HITEC Foundation by a leader she had worked with at IHCC for 16 years.
“It was a very full circle moment for me,” she said. “It just goes to show that you can never completely write your own narrative. I never could have told you when I was graduating how things were going to unfold.”
Another moment Francis said she couldn’t have predicted was being selected as this year’s SLCL Convocation speaker.
“When I first saw the email, I thought it was spam,” she laughed. “I think that goes back to something we try to do for our students: being their cheerleaders when they try to downplay their efforts. Working within underrepresented groups, we find that talking about our successes isn’t necessarily looked upon in the best way, and I’m really trying to shift that narrative for our students. We tell them if you don’t want to talk about it, let our organization spotlight you because you deserve a pat on the back. [Having a moment like that myself] was such an honor, and it was just humbling to know that my work within the nonprofit space was being noticed at all.”
One thing Francis has always been sure about: the value of her language education.
“I remember when I was selecting my major, people would ask me, ‘What are you going to do with a Spanish major? What do you think you can do?’” said Francis. “And I was like, ‘I could do anything.’”