By Camille Cox | Staff Writer
Baylor Academic Advising hosted the Majors Fair on Tuesday in the Bill Daniel Student Center. Leah Smith, University Advisement academic adviser, worked with her department and took the lead to make the Majors Fair come to life.
“We initially modeled it off of the jobs fair that the Career Center does and then just went from there,” Smith said.
Smith said 34 departments were represented during the Majors Fair, which lasted from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. The fair took place during Dr Pepper Hour, offering students a chance to explore different fields of study while partaking in the Baylor tradition.
“We had tables lining the room, and multiple faculty sat at the tables,” Smith said. “Students walked in, walked around the room, talked to professors at the tables and got a lot of swag and a lot of handouts.”
Orange County, Calif., sophomore Lucas Reyes said he attended the Majors Fair to learn more about graduate school and what he needed to do to prepare for that.
“I talked to them about getting a double major or getting a minor and some things I needed to do to better my chances of getting into grad school,” Reyes said.
Reyes said he benefited from the Majors Fair but thought that the event could have been advertised more to students as an academic resource.
“Not very many people knew about it,” Reyes said. “I think this is a very good tool, and I didn’t even know about it last year at all.”
Westland, Ore., freshman Katie Kling said she visited the Majors Fair twice to learn more about her options as an anthropology major.
“I’ve been deciding concentrations and looking at minors, so I wanted to get an overview of what Baylor had to offer — especially with some of the classes I’ve been taking now — and trying to figure out what I want to do,” Kling said.
Similarly, Indonesia freshman Trudy Widjaja said she attended the Majors Fair to learn more about what paths she could take as a pre-psychology major.
“I don’t really know what I want to do yet in terms of career, so I wanted to find a minor to pair up with my major that fits well,” Widjaja said.
Both Widjaja and Kling said they participated in the bingo game, in which students could visit different tables and ask the faculty member present to initial the box in order to strike a “BINGO” and get their name entered in a raffle for prizes such as a homecoming sweatshirt, Baylor-personalized cornhole and even an Apple watch.
“We did a fake bingo game, and they were all given a bingo card,” Smith said. “So if they got eight professors to initial their bingo card, they were entered into a drawing for a prize, and we’re going to be doing the drawing tomorrow.”
For students who missed the fair, the Major Exploration project under University Advisement offers resources, such as a breakdown of listed majors and faculty mentors who students can reach out to for more information.
