First off, huge kudos to the team of Career Services for making this event happen. It looked like a lot of work, and it’s so great that they pulled it off, and it went so well. The Career Fair has been a prominent event for all the students of Illinois Tech, as it helps them get one step closer to their dream job. For a change, the career fair happened at two different prominent buildings on our campus, Herman Hall and the MTCC Ballroom. Herman Hall hosted the majority of incoming companies, whereas the Ballroom hosted a few major Electrical companies and Civil Engineering companies. There was apparently an exclusive session held for undergraduate students, giving them insights into how to start their career prep early. Various LinkedIn posts from the Career Services page were shared with the students on how to be career fair-ready, asking the right questions, dressing the right way and providing post-career fair tips. There were free professional headshots taken, professional clothes provided to the students to dress better and free goodies given to students on behalf of the companies.
However, a few people suggested that a few tweaks could have made a much bigger difference. People were incredibly happy with the number of Civil, Manufacturing and structural companies showing up. There were even a few Electrical companies, such as Mitsubishi Electronics. But the IT students looked depressed about the least number of IT companies with open roles for booming technologies such as Artificial Intelligence or Cybersecurity. As such, there was a huge crowd to meet the employers and have a chat with them about opportunities, as there were at least 100 Computer Science majors who showed up to the fair with only around 5-7 companies in their domain.
I suggest that maybe in the upcoming fairs, this could be more organized, such as making the students register beforehand for the companies they would like to talk to, have a better estimate of the crowd or maybe have a recap session from the company heads later on after the fair to give students who missed to talk to the company they wanted due to huge demand.
However, in my opinion, the Fall 2025 career fair was at least a few steps ahead compared to the Fall 2024 fair, and I truly believe the next one will be a major hit