“I see a lot of criminal justice and finance here,” Said Allison Knipe , senior marketing major.
Many students were complaining about how the Career Fair was not what they expected the fair was going to be, saying the Career Fair is a great opportunity for students with certain majors, and that it was too crowded.
However, Athletic Connection, which is the organization who handed employer recruitment, prefers to keep the events to 20 or less employers. This encourages more in depth conversations with students.
Athletic Connection is an organization to help establish connections between student athletes and employers. The idea is to help the student athletes that do not go professional get a job. The partnership with Athlete Connection and Career Planning was to identify new employers to work with in the future.
According to Matthew Battista, Assistant Director of Career Planning, there were supposed to be more but there were several last minute cancelations, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), DaVita Labs, Teach for America, the Golf Channel, Waddell Reed, and the Hershey Company.
We had some Saint Leo Alumni represented by Northwestern Mutual and IMG Academy. Copley Gerdes, an ‘06 grad with a religion degree, works for Northwestern Mutual, and Konstantin Pyankov, a ‘13 grad with a sports business degree and a minor in marketing, works for IMG Academy.
Battista said the purpose behind this fair was for students to make connections and start networking.
Rob Liddell, Director of Career Planning, expressed that this new event was more like an appetizer to the main course, the Spring fair. The Spring Career Fair will try to target 60+ employers for all majors and all years.
“We want to identity the right companies for the right students. We will be working with faculty, staff, and students to help us identity Saint Leo’s top employer partners,” Battista said.
