Last week can be summed up in two words: Kanye and fair.
Everyone has heard about Mr. West victimizing poor Taylor Swift at the VMAs, but another large event happened right here on our campus: the Job and Internship Fair.
That’s right, representatives from big name companies like Goldman Sachs and Con Edison all tabled at the Events Center, looking for new faces interested in making a lasting impression on the job market. Sounds like heaven, especially in this economy, right?
Well, not really.
I attended the fair on Wednesday, looking spiffy in my shirt and tie, ready to meet some employers willing to hire. As I was walking around the mighty Events Center, I came to notice one thing: Most of the employers were looking for someone who was either a business or accounting major. Sadly enough, I am neither.
Of course, there were the exceptional companies that claimed they were looking for “all majors,” but we all know that’s a load of poo. How an insurance group would plan on using an anthropology major is beyond me.
As a pre-pharmacy student, I was hoping some super-cool pharmaceutical company whose mission is to make available the swine flu vaccine to all college campuses would be there. I guess the traffic was really bad that day or something, because they never came. And I got all dressed up, too.
All I could think about while walking aimlessly through the crowd of determined bodies was how convenient it would be had I been in the School of Management.
There’s no denying that some majors require more social access than others. Pre-health majors seem to have no problem with employment after schooling, but the same cannot be said for majors like business or economics, where employers notoriously put a larger emphasis on networking. In this way, the job fair was beneficial, because it gave students the opportunity to form these relations.
It would still be nice, however, to have more available options to the pre-health population. Not everyone majoring in biology is looking to work in a hospital. There are some students who are also interested in the commercial setting, or maybe those who don’t know what they want yet because they haven’t even been exposed to enough.
Internships are supposed to give willing learners a chance to experience new options, but that can’t happen if the emphasis is always concentrated elsewhere.
Binghamton is home to a variety of studies from interdisciplinary majors from psychobiology to philosophy, politics and law. Everyone should have an equal opportunity to explore their respective fields and careers, as that is undoubtedly the main reason why we are all at college.
This is not to put the Job and Internship Fair down, but I think with a more diverse population of opportunities more students would get more out of the event.
When everyone is considered, everyone is happy.