In response to Brock Turner’s “Expanding your circle starts with you,” I don’t believe that DePauw’s career fair is a useful way to obtain internships or post-grad positions. The career fair instead exemplifies the Hubbard Center’s complacency in helping students realize their future goals.
This semester’s career fair has 29 (not 50, as was previously stated) companies attending, and of these “companies” is the Air Force ROTC, Illinois Institute of Technology, Marian University with St. Vincent (an online nursing program), and Indiana INTERNnet (a website claiming to connect students with internships). For the 24 actual companies remaining, most are lesser-known with positions only open in the Indianapolis area.
After talking with friends that are Kinesiology, Computer Science, Political Science, Communications, and even Economics majors, they all have the same complaint: there are no businesses coming to the career fair that have positions of interest to them. There are no Fortune 500 firms, no media outlets, no IT firms, no governmental entities, and the list continues. The career fair only caters to a small circle, for those students interested in a business administration position in the Midwest.
Before winter break, I was talking with a DePauw alumnus that works at a company where I had applied for a post-grad position, and he asked me what type of career services DePauw offered. I was confused by the question since he attended DePauw and should have an idea, but I answered that my experience with acquiring internships has been through emailing alums to set up phone interviews, like this one. The alumnus then explained that he had a few children who also went to DePauw, and he was disappointed by the lack of help that DePauw offers students in securing internships and post-grad positions.
His youngest daughter ended up at Colgate University (where our former university president resides), and he said that even though that school is about the same size as DePauw, its career center sustains connections with many Fortune 500s. Additionally, all freshmen are required to create resumes and submit them to the career center so the resumes are always on file to give to companies.
Although the bleak and underrepresented career fair prospects do not make or break the success of DePauw students post-grad, it is an indicator that the Hubbard Center is complacent in helping all students work towards their dream job or internship. The Hubbard Center does a poor job of maintaining relationships with top firms or the many alumni who work there. It instead tries to force students to apply for positions at average companies because it is less effort for the Hubbard Center than working with students to reach their individualized career goals.
The Hubbard Center approaches job placement like a math problem; they believe there are procedures and formulas to accurately answer the jobless student question. If the Hubbard Center employees want students to be successful when they graduate, they should listen to students’ individual desires, and genuinely work with them, and DePauw alumni, to foster success.
The Hubbard Center should practice what it preaches and cultivate relationships with alumni who have chosen a wide array of career paths. Expanding DePauw’s circle starts with all of us, administration included.