Going to the Expo Career Fair

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Ashley
Purdue has a great reputation when it comes to its career fairs.  Two really big ones for engineers are Industrial Roundtable (IR) in the fall and Expo Career Fair in the spring.  Last Tuesday, I went to the Expo Career Fair.
Compared to IR, Expo is a bit smaller; for example, IR is two days long, whereas Expo is only one day.  In addition, fewer companies come to Expo to IR, but that is totally ok.  Personally, I liked the smaller setting because it was less stressful.  From my own experience I feel like there’s a lot more pressure on IR than Expo, so Expo was a way less stressful and nerve racking experience for me. 
To prep for Expo, I spent the weekend before it fine tuning my resume and researching companies that I wanted to speak to.  I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of companies looking for Environmental and Ecological Engineers, because since we are so small and new, we usually don’t have as many companies as bigger majors.  I had wanted to go to a couple of the company seminars on Monday, but wasn’t able to because I had class. 
On the day of Expo, I got up early so I could go to it in the morning.  It started at 9 am, and I was able to go to all the companies I wanted to before my 11:30 class.  Walking around, I noticed lots of companies for Aero/Astro engineers, mechanical engineers, and industrial engineers.  I really liked that it was indoors; it was nice to not have to worry about weather when planning my outfit.  I ended up going to 4 companies, and while I haven’t heard back from any companies yet, I thought that I got a lot more experience in talking to company recruiters and now feel a lot more confident about going to career fairs in the future. 
I definitely recommend going to Expo, and will most likely end up going again next year.  Even if you don’t get an internship out of it, it’s a really great opportunity to practice your networking skills and see some companies that you might not have seen at IR.  All in all, I had a positive time at Expo and am definitely glad I went. 

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