By Tristan Weisenbach
Managing Editor
One of the most important things a college student should walk away with after graduation is confidence that they will find a job, and a key responsibility that every college and university must uphold is to provide students with the tools and resources necessary to ensure that they can in fact do this.
The College has many great resources that it provides to help students find internships and job opportunities, and I believe it does this significantly better than other schools.
Guest speakers are frequent in many of the classes I’ve taken so far. The Handshake platform emails me on a weekly basis with new open internship positions that it thinks would best suit me and my interests. Engaging events, both campus-wide and major-specific, that aim to teach us more about the industries we plan to enter in the future are held multiple times each semester.
All of these supportive initiatives, however, got my hopes up too high for the College’s semesterly Career Fair — which was quite a let down, to put it lightly.
Branded as an event for students of all majors to attend and connect with employers about potential opportunities, I went in expecting to be greeted by at least a handful of relevant companies in the journalism field.
As I walked down each aisle of tables, however, I passed banner after banner reading “engineering,” “finance” and “medical.”
The sheer lack of representation for not only my major, journalism, but for all fields of study within the School of Arts and Communication, was disheartening to see.
There are plenty of local newspapers, communications agencies, film and production studios, museums, art galleries, libraries and performance venues — and that’s just scratching the surface — that could have easily been included in the fair. Why weren’t they?
The School of the Arts and Communication is, indeed, the smallest school at the College in terms of the number of students. However, that does not make us any less important than other schools.
I am truly pleased that there are so many opportunities for my fellow engineering, finance and nursing students, and I hope that any who attended the Career Fair were able to walk away with a sense of fulfillment. However, I know there are plenty of opportunities for students like me in the artistic, creative fields, too — we just didn’t see them in the Brower Student Center on Sept. 25.
While I do not believe the lack of representation of employers in the ArtsComm-related fields was intentional, I do believe the College needs to do more to ensure equal representation at events such as this one.
As a college student, if I am attending my school’s campus-wide career fair, I should be able to reasonably expect there to be at least a handful of potential opportunities for me. Instead, I was left walking away without a single lead.
My thoughts are not just my own, either. After speaking with friends and fellow classmates who are also ArtsComm students about their experiences at the Career Fair, they were equally as dissatisfied as me. Some opted not to attend after hearing the poor experiences shared by others.
Many of us, including myself, are in our last year here at the College, and therefore will only have one final opportunity in the spring to attend the Career Fair again. I implore those who are tasked with planning next semester’s event to take steps to ensure there are more opportunities to encompass students of all majors. I’m sure students will take note.
