Just as Notre Dame has been taken over by its weeklong fall career fair, Belles have also been seeking careers across the street. On Wednesday from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., Saint Mary’s College hosted their annual “Future Fest” career fair in Rice Commons. The Career Crossings office organized the event for students to network with various industries offering internships or full-time jobs.
“A majority of the employers that are coming to the career fair usually are recruiting for full-time opportunities, but I would say about 75% of them are recruiting for internships as well. It’s a wide range of opportunities. Some of them have just one internship or one type of job that they’re recruiting for whereas others might have a whole slew of opportunities,” Stacie Jeffirs, director of the Career Crossings office, said.
A total of 26 companies attended the fair, including Fortune 500 corporations like Eli Lilly and KPMG.
“It’s pretty intimidating at first, because you know, there’s this big company, but they’re all pretty friendly and they have opportunities for a bunch of different majors,” junior Grace Wasicki said.
A communication studies major, Wasicki attended the fair to gain experience in networking and explore what the event had to offer.
“It was one of my first career fairs, so I just really wanted to have experience talking with other employers,” Wasicki said. “I got here early, because they’re just really ready to engage with me … they have a lot of opportunities for communication specialists, for example. I had a good experience talking with them.”
Sophomore Avery Macabee attended the fair to “get [her] name out there” for prospective internships.
“I was more looking into internships for over the summer. I talked with [Eli] Lilly and they have some pharmaceutical internships, and I'm really looking forward to that … they actually have a sophomore conference that is in the spring, and I plan on [going to] that,” Macabee said.
Jeffirs and her team in the Career Crossings office plan months in advance for the fair to ensure a good turnout from companies as well as students.
“We usually start, typically in the spring semester, planning for the fall. We'’l first start with planning on a date, planning out time, location, all of those things. And then we start sending out employer invites, usually late spring, early summer. Those go out throughout the entire summer, all the way up until the event. And then we will start marketing and promoting it as soon as students get back on campus,” she said.
The most challenging aspect of putting together an event such as the career fair, Jeffirs said, is timing everything well.
It is “making sure you get your invites out to employers on time, making sure that you start to promote it to students on time … Figuring out the pace of it and the timing of all of it is really important. So that way, not everything’s bottlenecked. You're not doing everything too early or doing everything too late,” Jeffirs said.
While a majority of recruitment for full-time opportunities or internships occur in the fall, tabling events and campus visits will continue throughout the year for students.
Jeffirs offered a list of tips for students to prepare for attending a college career fair in the future, such as researching the companies beforehand.
“Know who’s going to be there, know who you want to go visit, what you’re going to talk to them about when you get there when you get to the fair,” Jeffirs said. Students should take “notes, whether it’s on your phone, printed notes, or a notebook about what you want to talk about with each employer,” she added.
Piecing together an introduction to pitch to the employers was also suggested by Jeffirs.
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh I gotta go up and give this whole spiel’… but you don’t have to give the whole thing to the employer at once. Usually, you want it to be much more conversational … [think of] how to get them interested in you as a candidate,” Jeffirs said.
Students should also bring polished, focused physical copies of their resume and dress business casual in order to make good first impressions. Lastly, collecting contact information for each of the employers and reaching out to them after the fair is important for ensuring a lasting positive impression.
The Career Crossings office offers a career fair resource and preparation section on their Handshake accounts for students to access year-round.
Many students enjoyed the career fair as well and viewed it as a positive experience.
“I think it was highly organized, and all the employers were super nice, and talkative … [The career] fair helped [me] in networking,” Macabee said.
Students and faculty members assist students at the check-in table for the career fair. From left to right: senior Mari Pritulsky, senior Mariana Taskey, graduate student Anna Cavalier, career advisor Karen Manier, administrative assistant Emily Penaflorida, employer and career engagement specialist Amanda Crockett, assistant director Amanda Fitzpatrick and director of Career Crossings Stacie Jeffirs pose for a photo.
