A liberal arts or social sciences major navigating a career fair dominated by engineering students--and the employers who love them--can be a sobering experience. You’ll have to strategize, map out a plan of attack, and research the companies in attendance in order to make headway. If this all sounds vaguely warlike, it is. You’re making a beachhead on what may be foreign soil, and you’re here to win hearts and minds after you land.
You should appear flexible and engaged, and the recruiter will mirror you. Think of how to ‘sell’ your major, and use some of the following ideas:
- If your degree is in Literature, Media and Communication, you can work in all creative fields and departments within non-creative organizations, plus advertising, graphic design, or journalism, nonprofits, and communication to and management of all types of audience is your forte.
- If you’re a Public Policy major, you’ll be good at city planning, law, consulting, political consulting, project management, among others.
- History, Technology, and Society? Try consulting, government, health care administration, nonprofit, and social services, plus more.
- International Affairs majors are great for consulting, global development, international business, public health, governmental agencies, law, and much more.
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Don’t go expecting to get a job that day. Treat your trip to the career fair as a fact-finding mission, which will temper disappointment; only a miniscule fraction of attendees receive immediate job offers. But go determined to engage company representatives, pitch your skill set(s), and illustrate your intrinsic value as a prospective employee. The creation of a good elevator pitch will be critical to your success. You may not be an engineer, but you can get a company interested in you by describing how your skills will work for them.
Translation: Make your work, work for the company. Show the company rep how you, perhaps as a public policy major, can be the perfect new-hire project manager because of your developed communication skills, long-range planning abilities learned in coursework, knowledge of governmental regulations, and experience leading a keystone project in class. If it sounds like you’re selling yourself as a sort of commodity, you are. More on that later.
Organization and note-taking will be your allies because of the amount of physical territory you may need to cover in a morning or a day. Plus, even with a list in hand of attending companies that you may have had time to research, you will still find out about businesses you aren’t familiar with, and jobs you had no idea existed.
And most of them are engaged in hiring students for an eventual management track.
Heads-up: With your nuanced communication skills honed as an Ivan Allen student, experience giving media-based presentations, and writing technical documents for a mix of audiences, you are what they seek. Seventy percent of effective management is effective communication and empathy. This is who you are. State it. Show it.
Research the entire event before you go. Read through the list of participating companies on the fair website. Find out the players in fields that can relate or extend to yours, but also find out about those companies you don’t know. There will be plenty, and every one of them is worth knowing about because of innovation, new trends, on-going projects; you will have something in your resume or studies that may make you especially attractive to any number of them. Go to the company websites, read about available positions, and then research the positions through Google, glassdoor.com, or other sources.
Such preparation will keep you from asking a dumb question like, “What does your company do?”
Dress the part. It won’t just be your skill sets that reps are looking at; they also are looking to see how you might fit within their organization. Make their job easier by showing how you look when dressed professionally. Remember you may be the ideal candidate for a management position, so you need to show that you know how to dress the part.
Take ample copies of your resume, and also a legal pad and pen to take notes.
Ask for the card of everyone you speak with. And if a representative is too busy to speak to you individually, ask for his or her card as well.
Be ready write down the details you learn as soon as you turn away with the card in hand. A line may have formed behind you, so don’t plan on writing everything down while still in front of the rep. And don’t ask company representatives to repeat information just because you don’t have anything to write with.
The refrain you hear from company reps will be ‘visit us online,’ so plan on doing that later. All those cards you collect and notes you took will come in handy, so you can research the companies and their available positions.
Don’t approach a company rep and expect that person to initiate the dialogue. You need to steer the brief interview, and ask pointed questions. You may be limited to only a couple of minutes, so make the time count.
Before you speak to a company rep, think about what you’re interested in, what you’ve been exposed to, what you excel at, and the types of class projects you’ve taken part in, or experience you have. Familiarize yourself with what the company does, and its mission statement or market (if you know it), and think about how to show you can fit in. And, if you find that a rep doesn’t seem to want to talk to you because you’re not an engineer or computer scientist, ask for the name(s) of any recruiters he or she left behind back at the office who would want to talk with a liberal arts or social sciences major. Be resourceful and remember that the reps who have come to the fair are probably not the only recruiters in that organization.
Because you are not in a narrow engineering field, you have to show flexibility and adaptability. Which, by the way, are traits of liberal arts and social sciences students. And you should state just that.
If you make your skills, experience, and interests relevant to a recruiter, you’re going to benefit every time.
You’ll need to have an efficient introduction ready for anyone you speak with. Respect the company rep’s time, so make it quick, and anticipate the questions he or she will ask.
Try something like this:
Smile. Extend your hand to shake. Begin.
“Hi, I’m [first name, last name], a [grade level/year], [subject] major interested in [intern, co-op, full-time, part-time], beginning in [season, year], with a concentration/acquired interest in/experience with [core concepts that the company might deal in]. I also [provide additional skill, or interest]. What do you have available in those, or related areas? How do you suggest I begin my search?”
Translation: “Hi, I’m Wendy Cho, a third-year economics major, with an emphasis on global financial systems, interested in co-op work, beginning in summer, 2014. My interests, due to two classes and a project I was part of, are forecasting, investment analysis, and international markets. And I also speak Spanish, which means I can communicate globally, and to divergent audiences. What do you have available in those areas, or in something similar? How do you suggest I begin my search?”
You have a ‘wider’ degree than, say, one in industrial engineering, which means you are equipped to communicate and lead change in more than one area as needed, and you’ll need to make the recruiter aware of that fact.
A good statement to make further along in the discussion is, “I can change along with you, because I’m educated to do so.” Provide an example from class.
And remember your communication and leadership skills, which you’ve highlighted in your resume. Those two skills make you a prime candidate for all professional and management jobs.
You might have language arts, creativity, or excellent problem-solving skills, all because of your liberal arts major. State them. Draw attention to them.
Approach small or medium-sized companies when you can. These companies are more fluid and adaptable, and willing to think in a different way about employees. Figuring out company size at a career fair might be difficult, unless you’ve researched them.
You should appear flexible and engaged, and the recruiter will mirror you. Think of how to ‘sell’ your major, and use some of the following ideas:
If your degree is in Literature, Media and Communication, you can work in all creative fields and departments within non-creative organizations, plus advertising, graphic design, or journalism, nonprofits, and communication to and management of all types of audience is your forte.
If you’re a Public Policy major, you’ll be good at city planning, law, consulting, political consulting, project management, among others.
History, Technology, and Society? Try consulting, government, health care administration, nonprofit, and social services, plus more.
International Affairs majors are great for consulting, global development, international business, public health, governmental agencies, law, and much more.
Get the picture? You’ll have to sell your skill set, your experience, and show how it relates and translates to a company. The recruiter probably won’t do that for you.
Be friendly, efficient, considerate, responsive, and receptive to new information. With each meeting, you’ll get a little bit better at your pitch and your questions. And you’ll soon have a healthy amount of information about companies and available positions in a number of fields. Having this amount of information is empowering, and will mean choices for you later. You’ll need to think creatively yourself to get a company to think creatively about hiring you.
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