Thursday, September 20, 2007

Career Fair

I recently attended a day at the career fair on campus and found myself to be severely disappointed. Before I went I looked at the website and looked for potential employers in need of newly graduated PR people. And what did I find? Not a whole lot...
I went ahead and trekked over to Bramlage (mostly on the encouragement of my boss) and walked around checking out the booths. I made one trip around to see if anything looked interesting and basically felt pretty awkward. Employers kept making eye contact with me, but it felt really weird and I just kept going. I mentally noted places that looked mildly interesting, intending to come back on my second trip around. I felt on the verge of stupid with my little name tag reading Public Relations when everyone else was Engineering or Chemistry. I saw one employer that caught my eye and got up the nerve to talk to him. I had no idea what they were about, but their visuals looked interesting and I at least wanted a little more information. The man looked at my name tag, saw Public Relations and went "eee... hmmmm.... uhhhh... Yeah, not sure we have anything for you." He didn't even know what PR was! I stumbled around looking for an explanation, but I was already nervous and felt silly approaching this engineering firm, so I didn't get anything to intelligent out. Turns out the company has a marketing section which he said "told us to get new colors because our old ones gave the a boring impression. So they revamped the marketing so that it is more pleasing to look at." Which is aka creating a brand identity. So as he explained this I chimed in "oh yeah, well that is one of the things that PR technicians do -- working with branding and brand identity." But of course, he was sent to the career fair to recruit engineers and therefore knew nothing about the marketing division. I got a piece of paper and was sent on my way.
And after this whole experience, I was pretty irked that the university makes such a big deal about helping students find jobs after graduation with great things like career fairs. It seems to me that they are forgetting some majors entirely. So all in all -- not very happy with that experience and have come to the conclusion that I may be better off just fending for myself when it comes to my future career.

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