The All Majors Career Fair: the perfect opportunity! If you’re looking for a job that has nothing to do with your major, that is.
The fair, held on Feb. 15, did not hold true to its name. While “all majors” implies that students earning degrees in a variety of fields will find opportunities, this is not really what the all majors career fair is about.
Instead of presenting students with field-specific, non-business paths, companies such as Fred Meyer and Radio Disney were looking for candidates for jobs that any student could fill, regardless of what they are studying.
Other than that, the fair was filled with organizations looking for business and engineering majors as usual. If the career center is going to put “all majors” in the title of this annual career fair, there should be more of a variety in majors that the organizations are looking for.
Throughout one’s college years, one typically hears that, aside from law, medicine and other specialized fields, one’s major will have very little to do with what they are qualified for. It is the earning of a degree that matters. Someone with a degree in theater can easily end up with a career in marketing, and vice versa.
The company representatives at the fair clearly disagree. If you go to a career fair, and a representative of a company asks you what your major is, and you say languages or philosophy or music, you will typically be told that there might not be any good positions of interest to you. But when you tell them about your minor in business or computer science, they change their mind.
Career fairs present students with great opportunities and are generally very helpful, but the All Majors Career Fair still had significantly more opportunities for those earning degrees in specific fields.
Students majoring in something other than business, engineering and computer science had to look a bit harder, because most of the companies there had work that seemingly anyone with a degree was qualified for.
While those are still good opportunities, that is not always why students pick the majors that they do. Some of them may be perfectly happy with jobs that simply want someone with a degree, others may be looking for something that relates to their major, seeing as their field of study interests them enough to want a job in said field as well.
For students who chose their majors because the topic is interesting despite its impracticality, there must be jobs out there that will remind them why they chose that major. For these people, the All Majors Career Fair was not necessarily the way to go.
As with any career fair, good opportunities must have been had by many. But some may have still been dissatisfied after seeing that their major seems useless in the working world.
The Career Center can still help, and there are many ways to obtain jobs. No one should feel as if their major is inadequate merely because the organizations present at career fairs are not the ones looking for philosophy majors, language majors and other less specialized fields.
The All Majors Career Fair is more like an “any major” career fair. Because those who chose their major solely based on their interest in that field may have a harder time finding the jobs they want upon graduating, perhaps there should be a fair dedicated to fields other than simply the most popular.