Opinion > September 13, 2007

By This column represents the views of the Old Gold & Black Editorial Board. |

We hoped that the Career Fest would be a fruitful endeavor, an event that allowed students to feel out potential career prospects and even better, to come away with the hope of landing a job post-graduation.

Unfortunately, many of our hopes were quickly deflated. If not in the business school or majoring in related fields such as economics, you would have been extremely lucky to find just one booth that sparked your interest. Business firms, consulting firms and accounting firms were wildly overrepresented at the Career Fest – which is just right for those interested in pursuing those jobs – but what about the rest of the student body? Lacking were the publishing houses, think tanks, the not-for-profits.

The university is defined as a liberal arts institution, and the majority of its students are majoring in one of those disciplines: philosophy, English, biology. The Career Fest left a glaring hole in terms of opportunities for those majors and thus a large number of students.

True, a biology or English major could easily find a job at a bank or a consulting firm and indeed, Career Services vaunts of its ability to find jobs for any major. However, its proper focus, which seems to be absent, should not be to find someone a job, but find him the job that he wants. Students major in biology, chemistry or Spanish to hone skills to apply to jobs in those fields, not to work in public relations for a bank.

In planning similar events in the future, Career Services should take extra care to solicit more job opportunities from a wider range of fields to accommodate a greater number of students. By not extending its efforts equally to all majors, it is wasting its time – and our educations.