Job/internship fair aims to help Arts and Letters students
By KATE NAGENGAST
News Writer
With a new facility, a new director and a new outreach program, the Career Center is excited and willing to help Arts and Letters students in a variety of new ways — including the first Arts and Letters Job/Internship Fair being held Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in LaFortune.
"We've had a stereotype that [The Career Center] is only for business and engineering students," said Lee Svete. Svete has been been the director of the Career Center since coming to Notre Dame from Colgate University last July.
"So what we set out to do was to draw some organizations to campus that have never been here before, and that would want to hire arts and letters students," Svete added.
"We started to make some phone calls and found very quickly that the reputation of Notre Dame was that of a great liberal arts school … so I felt we could do more for arts and letters students."
The center decided on a spring job fair because many employers who are interested in arts and letters students are "just-in-time recruiters." Many hiring companies also wait until late spring to hire employees because they are unsure of their hiring needs until immediately before the positions should be filled.
"There is this whole wave of social service organizations, government agencies, and fashion merchandise, broadcast journalism, education, law, and the list goes on … that don't even start hiring until March, April or May. While we operate on semesters … many of these employers who want to hire arts and letters students don't operate that way," said Svete.
Although hosting a fair like this is challenging for many reasons, The Career Center is optimistic about the success of this event with over 100 employers in over 20 different industries planning to attend.
"This has been one of the most exciting and explosive job markets we have seen in a long time," said Olivia Williams, Assistant Director of Career and Placement Services. "For us, it is phenomenal to have this many employers represented at an arts and letters job fair held in the spring. We've got companies we don't even have any place to put," Williams stated.
For many years, The Career Center hosted a career fair for arts and letters students, but its purpose was to provide students with information, not employment. This job and internship fair marks The Center's first attempt at aggressively gathering companies from a variety of industries who have an immediate need for arts and letters students. Each company represented at the fair will either send a representative or have a resume drop box.
"Traditionally, arts and letters students have not felt that career centers really addressed their needs," said Williams. "They would look at the list of companies that come and find that they are generally business related. While we don't have a lot of control over who comes to our campus recruiting, [especially since many businesses interested in arts and letters students] … may have a smaller pool of recruiters because in those industries there may not be as many jobs available," she added.
Svete agreed, "We have to be aggressive and go to them. [Through the resume drop boxes] some great employers will look at our students' resumes because we've reached out to them."
The Career Center invites not only arts and letters upperclassmen, but students from other colleges within the University, underclassmen, and students from other area colleges as well.
"We are seeing a lot of companies start earlier with internships to identify students as potential future employees. It used to be just juniors, but now the are increasingly looking at freshmen and sophomores," said Williams. "The earlier the students start in this process the greater their chances of success will be."
However, the process does not have to be a complicated one. "If this is a student's first time, [the fair is] informal enough that he or she can approach the representatives, some of whom are alumni, and make the personal contact, pick up a business card and follow-up later in writing. If a student knows that they have a particular interest, do some research and ask intelligent questions at the fair to show the representative what he/she knows," said Svete.
This first annual fair will be sponsored by larger corporations like ABC News Nightline, Bloomberg Financial Markets, Buck Consultants, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Journal and Courier (Garnnett), Pfizer-Steere Pharmaceuticals, Meijer, Anderson Consulting, Botta Trading, Easter Seals – Wisconsin, ESPN, Kaplan Educational Services, Profund Systems, and Cox Automation System, so that smaller businesses will not have to pay a participation fee. The sponsors also provided for the raffle of a 19-inch color TV.
As the variety of industries present at Friday's fair shows, without being trained in a specific skill like accounting or architecture, arts and letters students have a variety of options for employment; however, this often leads to confusion.
"Part of the challenge is to help arts and letters students find themselves, where they want to go and what they want to do," said Svete. "I think the best way to figure that out is to participate, do internships early, to get into the world of work and find their skills."
"[But] the challenge is threefold: the first being to bring the companies to campus, the second to engage the arts and letters students to start thinking about the process. I think the third thing that's going to happen is that these employers are going to recognize the talent that is here and want to return."
However, The Career Center is not only reaching out to business on behalf of arts and letters students but to the arts and letters students themselves. The Center now offers evening hours, on-call times for walk-in appointments at convenient locations like O'Shaughnessy and LaFortune, a new counselor specifically focused on advising arts and letters students, a computing center; an updated career library, the "Go Irish""web site for recruiting, interviewing and scheduling, and an outreach program focused on cooperative efforts with hall rectors and college deans to inform students of their services.
"The [Center's] outreach this year has just been tremendous, but the in-pouring and receptiveness of the students has been even more magnificent," said Williams.
All News Stories for Thursday, March 23, 2000
