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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