Staff Editorial: Career Fair not the only resource around campus

Last week was St. Joe’s biannual career fair. Every semester, hundreds of students, from sophomores looking for internships to seniors seeking jobs, attend in their professional attire. It can be an opportunity to get some face-to-face time with employers who are willing to hire those students with little or no experience.

But the career fair also has a stereotype as a forum with worthwhile jobs mainly for accounting and marketing majors and scraps for everyone else. The overwhelming presence of sales, insurance, and management jobs don’t do much to combat that belief.

There is a reason for this, of course—communications, design, and advertising companies, as well as many other industries, don’t do much of their recruiting through college career fairs, preferring instead to recruit through job postings and employee recommendations. Not-for-profits and government agencies, on the other hand, often don't have either the personnel or the resources to participate.

The Career Development Center does what it can to alleviate the situation. Not-for-profits, school districts, and government agencies get 60 percent off for a booth. Industries which don’t usually send representatives to the career fair are especially targeted by Career Development staff. Efforts are made to expand the fair beyond those industries useful mainly to business majors.

Despite these efforts, though, there are some things that could be done better. The university could commit to subsidizing some of the cost of the career fair. That would allow lower rates to be charged, and perhaps encourage more businesses (especially not-for-profits) to attend. When the university spends tens of thousands of dollars on the Spring Concert, it’s a little disconcerting that the career fair is expected to be revenue-neutral.

Off-campus trips to companies that don’t usually show up to the career fair could also be better publicized, perhaps through disseminating the information to resident assistants and to the main page on MySJU.

But the reality is that the career fair is not the only option for students who want to find a job. It serves a limited purpose—it is easy to get to and provides face-to-face time with employers. But it also has drawbacks. No matter what Career Development does, not every business will want to pay an employee to recruit college students.

College of Arts and Sciences students who don’t want to sell insurance for a living should take advantage of the other services the university offers—opportunities like mock interviews, resume critiquing, and customized instruction on how to find a job for any major.

Real life isn’t like college. To succeed, we need to find opportunities and take them. That's why it is particularly disheartening, for instance, that the not-for-profit career fair every spring suffers from poor attendance.

So, yes, the career fair is not for you if you want to work in a specialized industry that doesn’t have a business background. But there are so many other tactics for finding jobs that it should not matter. Whether you’re a management major, an English major, or spent your time at St. Joe's studying ancient Greek, here’s a tip: take some initiative on your own and take advantage of the resources that are available to you.