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At the fall Career Fair, some majors need not apply
Today marks the first day of the Career Center’s Fall Career Fair: a now two-day event that will feature 130 employers. Despite all these options, students who are studying something other than business, engineering, science or math may be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of opportunities that align with their interests.
Of the 130 employers who will attend the All-Campus Internship and Job Fair, about 60 of them are listed on CareerLink as recruiting exclusively science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and/or business majors. Most of the rest of the employers are listed as recruiting “all majors,” but even these companies—which include Goldman Sachs, Bain & Company and Epic—are heavily weighted toward business and STEM. These figures may not seem egregious, but they also do not reflect all the employers that attended yesterday’s business- and STEM-specific career events. Meanwhile, career opportunities for students studying the humanities, social sciences and arts are chronically underrepresented.
The career fair lineup is just one symptom of a lack of balance within Washington University’s career planning services. While the business school has its own career center, College of Arts & Sciences students—with their highly diverse array of academic interests and career goals—are left with the general Career Center as their primary resource. The Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts is serviced by a dedicated career adviser within Sam Fox in addition to the general Career Center, while engineering also relies on the University-wide Career Center. This is not to say that the University-wide Career Center is not a valuable resource or that it does not cater to specific interests; indeed, the Center offers informational events, interest groups and advising for a variety of specific fields, from entertainment to health care to public policy. However, with the exception of expensive and time-consuming events like road shows and externships, these industry-specific opportunities tend to be rather informal and focus more on learning and exploring rather than networking and applying.
This lack of guidance for students in the humanities, social sciences and arts becomes even more frustrating when you consider that positions related to those fields—for instance, jobs in government, media or communications—are often highly competitive and tend to favor applicants with connections and prior internship experience. In particular, the importance of connections and internships (which, especially in these fields, are often unpaid) puts students who may not be as well-connected or may not be financially able to take an unpaid internship at a disadvantage.
Of course, the Career Center cannot be blamed for industry-wide and market-wide preferences. Not every company can recruit a huge batch of entry-level employees several times per year—big, international firms like Target and Google (which tend to recruit mainly business and STEM students) are the exception, not the rule. Also, it does not make sense for every industry to recruit at Wash. U.—a TV network like NBC is obviously going to focus its recruiting efforts on schools with entertainment programs, like New York University and the University of Southern California, rather than a school like ours.
That said, Wash. U.’s career development services should be actively working to help students who find themselves up against such obstacles. The resources that the Career Center already offers are certainly valuable, but when it comes to connecting non-business/STEM students with people and opportunities that will help build their careers, there is more to be done.
Editor’s note: This editorial has been updated to reflect that the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts is serviced by a dedicated career adviser within Sam Fox in addition to the general Career Center, while engineering also relies on the University-wide Career Center.