By Matthew Muir | Staff Writer
Representatives from around the world will converge at Baylor Tuesday for the International Christian Schools Job Fair, which will give students the chance to learn about job opportunities at international schools and organizations.
Held from 2-6 p.m. in 506 Cashion Academic Center, the job fair was planned by Baylor’s Career Center in conjunction with the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI). The job fair is a traveling event organized by ACSI with Baylor being the third stop; the job fair previously visited Grand Canyon University and Liberty University.
More than 30 organizations from five continents are represented. Shelby Ceferatti, marketing communications coordinator for the Baylor Career Center, said the job fair is a unique opportunity for students to find work abroad.
“The chance to be a student, recently [graduated], to travel around the world, to get work experience, to get cultural experience, to get just world experience, is phenomenal,” Ceferatti said. “It’s such an eclectic group and such a wide variety of different places that you could just put your finger on a map and say, ‘I want to travel here and work,’ and they might be able to help you with that.”
Desiree Foley, assistant director of the Baylor Career Center, served as the project lead for the job fair. Foley said the participating institutions want to fill full-time positions.
“[The ACSI] actually [works] with these schools and bring them to the United States, to various colleges, to recruit students for full-time positions in their schools,” Foley said. “The majority of those [jobs] are to teach English because these schools are coming from all over the world.”
In addition to teaching English, Cefaratti said that opportunities are offered in a myriad of fields.
“We do feel like it’s a very good opportunity for our students… there’s lots of different opportunities that are available from marketing, business, financing, teaching… you name it,” Cefaratti said.
Foley said the Christian institutions at the job fair also have numerous openings for jobs in the field of religion.
“[There are] also Bible teacher[s],” Foley said. “Lots and lots of Bible teacher jobs and some chaplain jobs.”
Foley said the intersection of faith and far-flung locales make the job fair an event well-suited for the interests of Baylor students.
“We really want to bring every opportunity to our students. We really as a career center try to cater and tailor the types of opportunities we bring to students based on their interests,” Foley said. “If we have students that want to work overseas and we can make that available to them and make it easier for them to do that, we want to do that… this is just one very unique calling some students might have.”
Drawing from the university’s stance that the world needs high-profile Christian institutions like Baylor, Cefaratti said the job fair is a way for students to spread Baylor’s teachings around the world.
“It helps spread the message [about] what Baylor is,” Cefaratti said. “There’s the idea that Dr. [Linda] Livingstone said: the world needs a Baylor. This is providing the world with our Baylor students.”
