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Lessons of a Career Fair

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By Donald Trent

I recently attended the Carnival of Companies -- also know as the engineering career fair -- on my campus. This annual event has always amazed me in its sheer size. More than 150 companies come with their impressive displays and booths for the sole purpose of recruiting engineering students. At my undergraduate institution, the only career fair was much smaller and open to all students. But at this one, there are no history majors, no business majors, no biology majors. Just engineers.

In the past, I had always been more of a window shopper at the career fair. I would talk to recruiters mostly with the intention of finagling some of the free stuff they offered (T-shirts, pens, toys, markers). This year, however, I was all business. I was there to find a job.

The event may sound like a gold mine for any engineering student looking for a job, and it is, I found out -- as long as you're not a doctoral student. Before the fair, I read up on some of the companies and the type of people they were looking to hire. It wasn't long before I realized that most of the companies were not looking for Ph.D.'s. They were looking to make mass hires to fill entry-level positions ideally suited for students just finishing their bachelor's or master's degrees.

Unfortunately, most of the companies at the fair didn't know what to do with the résumé of a Ph.D. candidate. Most recruiters politely took mine anyway but seemed unsure about who would actually read it. I had the feeling more than once that my résumé was headed for the circular file.

Since most of the companies made clear they weren't even looking to hire Ph.D.'s, I focused on the few that were. That left me with some corporations with strong research-and-development groups and government research labs. My best conversations were with recruiters from two government labs. They told me upfront that the work was related to defense projects but pointed out that they were also involved in some interesting biomedical and imaging projects. They seemed genuinely interested and wrote down some divisions where they thought I would fit within their labs. This was an avenue I hadn't given much thought to before the career fair, but after talking to these recruiters I felt encouraged to pursue it.

Not all of my interactions went so well. At some companies I stood in line for more than an hour with a sea of undergraduates looking for summer internships as well as permanent positions. The recruiters would try to spend a few minutes with each individual but that quickly made the wait unbearable. Losing patience, I simply dropped my résumé on top of a rapidly growing pile and moved on.

Besides looking into industrial-research opportunities, I have also explored my interest in consulting by talking with some firms in that field. My impression was that the job market was pretty tight right now, and my fears were confirmed when I checked our career center's Web site and discovered that a vast majority of the consulting firms had canceled their on-campus visits.

I decided to go to a seminar on careers in consulting anyway. Here's what I learned: Consulting careers are challenging and constantly changing. They seem to provide great opportunities for advancement and developing new skills. But consulting often means being away from home and working at the client's site four or five days a week. If I were to pursue technical consulting instead of management consulting, I would be better served by gaining more experience in industry or academia beyond my Ph.D. thesis topic.

I'm still formulating my priorities and doing my "self-assessment" (the career counseling buzzword for discovering that happy medium where what you want and enjoy coincide with what you're good at), but there are enough negatives about consulting that I may not pursue this career option right after graduate school. I have some reservations about pursuing management consulting because I would feel like I was abandoning my technical area of expertise. I'm still interested in pursuing it as a possible career path in the future, but for now, I think I'll be better off by gaining more industrial or academic experience.

As for my academic job search, I attended an on-campus workshop about academic careers. I saw some graduate-student friends there, and we chatted about our own interests in teaching, research, and academia in general. I think we all felt a kinship in knowing we were tackling the same issues and concerns about embarking on an academic career. There were several nuggets of wisdom at the workshop, but the part that really struck home with me was a panel discussion with faculty members at different points in their careers, including a lecturer who had gotten off the tenure track and a full professor who was near retirement. The key, one of the speakers said, was to figure out what mix of teaching and research appealed. This faculty member talked about the joys of teaching and was very honest about the pressures of maintaining a high-quality research program. I could relate to what he was saying, because those are some of the same concerns I had about pursuing a tenure-track position at a major research university.

Even though I've just begun the whole job-search process, I've been fortunate to have both a universitywide career center and another for engineering that provide not only information but also valuable seminars, workshops, and counseling. After several years of neglecting these resources, I'm making up for lost time by attending numerous seminars on everything from designing résumés to negotiating job offers. One valuable suggestion I received was to take advantage of alumni contacts from my current university as well as from my undergraduate alma mater. It may not lead directly to a job, but I plan to contact fellow alumni and ask for advice and informational interviews. Using my alumni connections is something I hadn't considered before and it opens up a whole new avenue for networking.

Attaining my first job is the final destination, but my goal is to enjoy the journey. I realize that this may be a long and arduous process, but ultimately I want to make a decision that I am confident and comfortable with. In my next column, I'll talk about the fruits of my networking and how I am targeting my job search to specific institutions and companies in each of the career paths I'm considering.