Job Fairs
With the Engineering Expo coming up next Monday to Thursday down at Champaign, I will be hitching a ride down with my sister to check it out. My experience with these things has not been all that positive, but I figure that I might as well go and talk to some employers and see how the market is these days. Maybe I will even find a suitable job, but who knows.
In my first two years of school, I never really went to any job fair type thing, mostly because I didn't know about them or really care to attend. I didn't have a resume, and I usually wasn't seeking an internship because I had to count on spending every break with my Dad in Taiwan or whatever vacation spot they happened to choose. Plus the expo was usually in like the third week of school, when lazy me had barely unpacked the boxes in my dorm room and most likely had not even bought my books yet.
Junior year was a little bit different. By then, most of my friends were engineers, and people were starting to impress on me the idea that going to these fairs was very important. So I decided to put on a shirt and tie, show up with a folder of resumes, and start shoving them at whoever cared to take them. At this time, the economy had already begun its downturn and many companies were hiring a very limited number of students. Anyways, I didn't really happen to care much, I was just there to visit some booths, talk to some representatives, but most of all, get some free stuff. Free stuff was probably the best part about going to those fairs back then. I'd always just throw aside the company brochures and multimedia CD presentations they'd give me once I got back to my apartment, but those balls that flash when you bounce them were fun throughout all of my two years at 312. Even now, I am still using a Crest toothbrush with massaging tips that I got from a Proctor & Gamble company presentation. I got this big bottle of Febreze that I never opened but is sitting on my shelf too. Whenever I need a rag or something to wear while I change my oil, there is a pile old Compaq Moray Menace T-Shirts somewhere in my dresser. And if there is ever a pen shortage in this country, fear not because I've got a big bag full of pens from every company you can name, lying around in my closet or something.
Even so, once I got to be a senior, things had turned much more serious. The economy had not bounced back as expected, instead it got worse. At the expo, nearly half of the booths were empty because companies were forced to cancel their hiring. A lot of the companies that were there flat out told you that they were experiencing severe financial troubles and were most likely freezing any personnel additions. Others gave me some canned spiel about checking their website online and signing up for InterviewTrak. Good thing I attended, and your company sent you with a booth to tell me that looking online was better than talking to them in person. Needless to say, I was less worried about getting free mousepads that year, and more concerned about getting an actual interview or job offer.
As if matters could not be worse, in the middle of the expo, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center buildings and another into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, what I hope is the darkest day of history that I will ever have to experience during my lifetime. The last thing anybody wanted to talk about was job placement at that time, and rightly so. With all that was going on in the world, my personal concerns suddenly all seemed light and inconsequential.
Here I am now, a summer gone by since graduation, and once again it's expo time. Am I wiser? More experienced? Ready to impress some companies with my new qualifications? Not as far as I can tell. The only advantage I have now over past years is that I can start working right away. Yay for me. Honestly, though, I don't feel all that desperate to beg people for a job. I know in my heart that I am qualified and that I am smart enough to do a good job at anything they would give me a chance at. There is no sense in taking a dead-end, worthless job where I won't learn anything or improve myself, all the while being unappreciated and unrecognized for my work. I'm better off pursuing a graduate degree, continuing to learn from working with my dad, or maybe even starting my own thing.
Nevertheless, this is a big week for me. Even if I don't get a job, I will have a better idea of what my next step in life should be. If something does happen to open up for me, then who knows where I'm headed and what I'll be doing? I'll let you all know how it went when I get back.
