Career fairs lack fair job opportunity

There was a career fair a couple weeks ago, and a couple hundred upper-echelon employers crowded into Alexander Memorial Coliseum, sending good-looking, smooth-talking reps with shiny brochures to try to lure Tech's brightest and most talented to their companies. This sounds like a great opportunity to break into the work force and finally apply all of those equations that have been crammed down your throat for the past four years, right? Well it is, as long as you have a high enough GPA.

The fact is, a lot of these companies send these reps all over the country to career fairs, advertising their company and trying to lure in recent graduates. Also, there aren't many engineering schools with an undergraduate curriculum as difficult as Tech's.

What this means is that between two students of equal intelligence, accomplishment and determination, the one that goes to the easier school will have the edge in job hunting. It's better to be a big fish in a little pond than a little fish in a big pond. "That's a pretty bold statement," you say. "What about school prestige?"

School prestige is a very amorphous, abstract idea to nail down. A lot of employers would be very uncomfortable going on the record saying they would prefer to hire a 3.5 student from Tech than a 3.5 student from Southern Polytechnic. It's the same reason that we don't get a HOPE GPA adjustment here at Tech. Yes, our students are smarter and our school is harder, but how do you prove that? If you could prove it, how could you go about giving Tech a GPA adjustment for the HOPE grant without all of the other schools in the state crying about it?

Now off the record, I'm sure most employers would concede that Tech is a harder school than most and that a 2.7 student here is equally if not more capable than a 3.0 student at some other engineering school. However, that is not such a kosher thing to print in your company brochure. It's a lot more correct to just print "Minimum GPA requirement: 3.0." What a lot of people don't realize (and what nobody is ever told) is that these requirements were formulated to cover a wide variety of schools that they consider hiring from-not just the most difficult ones. Out of the schools that a company considers hiring from, the students from the more difficult schools just cannot compete on a GPA basis.

So why am I complaining about all of this? Well, for me the job fair sucked. I got told to my face numerous times that my GPA wasn't high enough. One company rep even laughed! He chuckled and said, "Yeah man, everything looks great, but what about that GPA?" "It's a hard school," I said. "Well, you're going to need to get that GPA up." I'm a senior. I've got 15 credit hours left to take out of 126. Do the math-the GPA isn't coming up much. (As a disclaimer, my GPA isn't horrible. It's north of a 2.5, but south of the common 3.0 cutoff.)

It's not that I mind that some companies are only looking for a 3.0 or higher, but just humor me and take my resume without crushing my dignity. I realize that not all companies are looking to hire me, but rejecting me to my face is just depressing. I can't be alone either. Looking over the grade distribution for the upper-level engineering classes, it becomes obvious in a hurry that a lot of people do not have a 3.0 major GPA. Where is the job fair for us?

Bypassing the career fairs and job searching online doesn't make things any easier. Now, instead of having your resume mixed in with people who went to the same school and took the same classes as you, you have your resume mixed in with resumes from people who (for the most part) went to easier schools. If you have a lower GPA, the larger companies will likely just ignore you.

If you have an otherwise decent resume, smaller local companies are a more realistic way to go. As with most things though, the more you apply and the more effort you put forth, the better your chances are. To be perfectly honest though, unless you're in the top third of students here at Tech, the career fairs are largely a waste of time. There, somebody had to say it.