Blog: Career Fair - Not Once, Not Twice
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Career Fair - Not Once, Not Twice - Thursday, October 22, 2009
Yesterday was my third time representing my company at the UCLA technical career fair. We seem to attend every fall and winter quarter, and I've been volunteering every time. It's a win-win: the company benefits from the recruiting, and I get a free trip to LA to see family and the gf (and I get more Southwest Rapid Rewards points, muahaha).
We're hiring mostly Software Engineers, so we look primarily for CS/CSE students at the fairs. Unfortunately, we didn't see many CS/CSE students this year- I talked to only a couple of CS students, and of the five resumes the other recruiter and I recommended, the majority of them were EE students with strong programming backgrounds. In fact, probably 70% of the students who stopped by our table were EE. 20% were physics majors.
I think it's mostly a branding problem. AST is a signals processing company, which implies that we have a lot of EE jobs. We do, but not entry level. And I think the Software Engineers outnumber the Electrical Engineers, since we have a very large and ever-growing software department. The other recruiter and I brought up our concerns about branding, so hopefully we'll see some changes by the next career fair. We also have a newly-created marketing department, so I'm counting on it!
Other than the career fair, I got to spend more time with Priscilla than I usually do, since I flew into LA a few hours earlier. We spent Tuesday evening trying on Halloween costumes at a seasonal shop (mostly just for fun since the costumes were cheap in quality yet ridiculously overpriced), eating at King's Burger (not your typical burger joint- I'm surprised at how many genres of food they have), and carving a pumpkin since she's had a deprived childhood and never done it before. We also took a bunch of pictures of my rental car, since I got a pretty swanky G6 GT this time. :)
We're hiring mostly Software Engineers, so we look primarily for CS/CSE students at the fairs. Unfortunately, we didn't see many CS/CSE students this year- I talked to only a couple of CS students, and of the five resumes the other recruiter and I recommended, the majority of them were EE students with strong programming backgrounds. In fact, probably 70% of the students who stopped by our table were EE. 20% were physics majors.
I think it's mostly a branding problem. AST is a signals processing company, which implies that we have a lot of EE jobs. We do, but not entry level. And I think the Software Engineers outnumber the Electrical Engineers, since we have a very large and ever-growing software department. The other recruiter and I brought up our concerns about branding, so hopefully we'll see some changes by the next career fair. We also have a newly-created marketing department, so I'm counting on it!
Other than the career fair, I got to spend more time with Priscilla than I usually do, since I flew into LA a few hours earlier. We spent Tuesday evening trying on Halloween costumes at a seasonal shop (mostly just for fun since the costumes were cheap in quality yet ridiculously overpriced), eating at King's Burger (not your typical burger joint- I'm surprised at how many genres of food they have), and carving a pumpkin since she's had a deprived childhood and never done it before. We also took a bunch of pictures of my rental car, since I got a pretty swanky G6 GT this time. :)
