CSO job fair offers seniors opportunities

The Career Services Office (CSO) will sponsor its eighth annual Spring Job Fling in Coltrane Lounge on Tuesday, March 2, where seniors still looking for jobs and juniors looking for summer internships will have the opportunity to speak to recruiters from a wide range of industries. The event, running through lunch hours (12-2) in Coltrane, gives seniors and juniors the chance to get potential internship and job leads as well as to practice their networking and interviewing skills with real employers in the industries they may be interested in pursuing.

At least 14 employers and graduate schools have confirmed their attendance so far at the event, including Duke University’s Fuqua Business School, the Peace Corps, Infosys, the Southern Teachers Agency and Partnership for Public Service.

According to Don Kjelleren, senior associate director of Career Services, “I like to call it ‘networking on training wheels.’ The Spring Job Fling is not meant to be a job fair, but rather to complement what our career counselors do. Sometimes it’s really hard and intimidating to talk to people face-to-face, but with this event, students have the chance to talk to live employers who want resumes and interviews on the spot without being in the pressure cooker of one of our off-campus events. These people are here to help, and they show a tremendous amount of interest in Middlebury by willingly making the trip here instead of having us come to them.”

In preparation for the event, the career counselors specializing in particular industries put together tables not only for the employers coming, but also with information on and opportunities available from other employers in similar fields. They also compile all the job opportunities currently available on MOJO and LACN, two of the online job search resources available to Middlebury undergraduates.

“We really want to give students a sense of the number of great entry-level, liberal arts appropriate jobs out there for undergraduates,” says Kjelleren. “This event serves as a kind of call to action for the seniors who have not yet had the chance to go out and secure something. We’re really trying to work with students to put their best foot forward, but in order to do that they need to show up and put energy into the search themselves. This event offers them one more chance to kick start the process.”

The Spring Job Fling fits into the CSO’s Senior Program, a year-long initiative geared toward helping graduating seniors not only find something to do after graduation, but also toward teaching them the life skill of how to conduct a job search. Although most of the major recruiting events, including four off-campus interview days in New York, Boston, and Washington D.C., as well as several graduate school and job fairs held on campus, occur in the fall, the Spring Job Fling gives seniors who may not have been ready in the fall an opportunity to take advantage of all the resources the CSO has to offer.

“What’s really different about this event,” says Kjelleren, “is that the CSO Counselors take what we do here and go out and showcase it. It helps for seniors to realize that they are not alone in this job search process, that many of their classmates find themselves in the same circumstances, and that there is a support system in place to help them deal with it. Our hidden agenda for the event is to introduce ourselves to the seniors who many not have already come in to see us. This event can help seniors find out who the appropriate counselor to talk to about their industry of choice is. It also helps to show them the resources the CSO offers, including career coaching, practice networking, writing referrals, and looking over resumes.”

Generally, between 150 and 200 seniors attend this spring event, and despite the change in location due to the new layout of the Ross Dining Hall, the CSO Counselors hope for a similar or even greater turnout this year.

“It’s really about information gathering and making informed decisions,” says Kjelleren. “In this job market, students serious about getting a job need to take advantage of every single networking opportunity, and it doesn’t get much easier than this!”