Paritosh Gaiwak
Paritosh Gaiwak
Career fairs are an important part of a college student’s life. Every student looks forward to them as a gateway to the career they have dreamt of. Many of my own classmates consider career fairs to be the most important part of graduate study period. However, my latest experience with the engineering career fair has led me to question our approach towards them as well as their overall utility.
I feel that the career fairs are a huge waste of time. I will substantiate my statement with mathematical calculation. I interacted with many of my batchmates. All of them were able to meet representatives from between six and 10 companies. The number of the students who were able to visit recruiters from 10 companies was small.
On an average, if a student visited eight different representatives and each company’s representative talked to him for five minutes, they spent 40 minutes gaining knowledge about eight companies. The fair was from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Assuming that a student was there for 75 percent of the total time (6.5 hours), they were there for nearly 293 minutes. So, effectively, the student wasted 253 minutes at the fair deciding what lines are worth it, and just waiting. For someone who visited the fair on both days, that number is 506 minutes (nearly 8.5 hours).
The worst part is not that a student wasted a little more than four hours for utilizing 40 minutes. Rather, the worst part is that after spending so much time waiting in queues, towards the end of our chat with the representative we get a name of the website where they ask us to apply online. If you are lucky they might ask you a few questions, but generally online application is their ultimate answer.
If we have to apply online in the end, why should we bother standing in long queues and wasting our valuable time? Many of my friends had to miss their classes on the two days of the career fair and had to suffer substantial delays in their plans to submit their assignments and projects.
I do not expect that students end up getting jobs and internships on the days of the fair itself, but the kind of effort students make to attend the fair and preparing for it is not justified by the amount of time spent at the fair.
The career fair does have the advantage of providing budding wannabes in STEM fields, or any other field, with information about what the leading industries in their fields are doing. However, we live in a digital world now where such information is a few minutes and taps on the keyboard away. Moreover, I have realized that the information given online is more substantial as compared to what we receive at a fair.
Some students may argue that I am being overly harsh in my critique and that the career fairs do make an individual aware of the kind of skills the companies are expecting in their prospective employees. I agree with this argument to some extent. However, in my opinion, the difference in the skills that we come to know about in career fairs and what we can figure out on our own is not huge.
I feel that it would be more beneficial for us if instead of this extravaganza of a career fair, we communicate with the companies over digital media, hold video chats with the recruiters and if possible — depending on the location of the company and our convenience — visit its office or headquarters.
This would save our time and allow us to reach out directly to the industries we intend to work for. If we are able to visit the office of the company we can also get a firsthand experience of the functioning and work place environment of the company. This is obviously more helpful in saving our time and at the same time allows us to explore the industries to a greater extent than what a career fair can provide us with.