With the Fall Job and Internship Fair coming up next Thursday, campus is abuzz with students tweaking their resumes and fine-tuning their elevator speeches.
This year, the fair will feature a number of familiar faces – Caterpillar, Inc., OSF Healthcare System and the City of Peoria – and this is no surprise. Majors like marketing, computer science and accounting always appear to have a range of opportunities to choose from.
But this time around, The Scout took note of an increase in the number of employers from communications and creative fields.
It’s great to see some more competitive fields are receiving more representation, and we applaud the Smith Career Center for putting forth the effort to find these employers.
But students in some disciplines need to realize that the Job and Internship Fair may not be the right place for them to search for jobs.
Jon Neidy, executive director of the Smith Career Center, said his department is trying to expose students to the ways that their distinctive majors are recruited, many of which do not include going to job fairs.
That means theater majors probably won’t have any luck walking into the fair hoping to find an open audition. Creative writing majors might not be able to submit their poetry books and short stories to a publishing representative. Art majors probably won’t find a free sign-up to participate in a gallery tour.
We don’t expect Bradley students to have expectations this outlandish, but we do believe some have set the bar a little too high.
Instead, they should take advantage of other opportunities offered by the Smith Career Center – things that may not take the form of a traditional job fair.
Students should find an on-campus interview or a road trip – yes, this is all offered through the career center.
But if by some act of the devil, a student can’t find the resources they want by using the career center, they should do some research and meet some people who currently employed where they want to work.
College is all about being proactive. Jobs don’t find students; students have to seek them out.
And now is a great time to start.
