By Brittney Matthews | Photographer
Some of the biggest academic buildings on Baylor’s campus are the Hankamer School of Business and the Baylor Science Building reflecting the amount of money and energy Baylor puts into these two programs over all the other majors.
This effort is also shown in the career fairs Baylor hosts on campus. Most of the companies that make an appearance are within the business and science department. If your major isn’t business, STEM, nonprofit or education, it can be difficult finding the right company to talk to.
My major is Photojournalism and I attended the career fair Baylor hosted in the fall. I found that there were no companies that were hiring for my specific major or companies that I was interested in. The closest opportunities I found were marketing and film festival companies.
After this disappointment at the career fair I set up an appointment with the assistant director of the Career Center, Amy Rylander, to discuss bringing new companies to the career fair that pertains to more majors. The appointment was a success as Rylander made a list of companies that I would be interested in and assured me she would contact the companies I suggested.
However, as I was looking on the list of companies for the spring 2020 career fair, I noticed none of the companies I listed were on it. After doing some more research, I found out from Rylander that the companies were reached out to and they were interested in recruiting Baylor students, but not in coming to the career fair.
Since the companies are not interested in recruiting through career fairs, I propose we do a different thing for the majors not represented in the career fairs. Making connections is still a very important part to getting a job after graduation, so I think we should have more opportunities to interact with these companies outside of career fairs. This could be through local conventions they come to or through individual meetings. I’m not sure what this would look like in the future, but I would appreciate having more opportunities to get to know companies that could potentially hire me.
