The Student Government Association collaborated with the Center for Career Services last week to hold its annual spring Career Expo, with expanded panels, tables and opportunities to interact with alumni.
Demetrius Apostolis, a senior and the expo’s executive director, said about 2,400 students registered to attend the Expo prior to Friday’s fair, which hosted 47 employers from federal agencies, technology companies and engineering corporations. He said this year, the Expo added an alumni brunch, panels with professionals from political fields and student support tables to grow student participation in the Expo’s events.
This year, the Expo team expanded the event to hold a career fair biannually, adding a fall fair to address student concerns about a lack of STEM jobs represented at the event in previous years and invite STEM employers to both events. Attendance at the September Expo nearly doubled, reaching 2,000 attendees compared to 1,100 participants last February.
“Having students know when this event is, having it continue to have a reputation so that people know how to prepare for the job search is so much more important,” Apostolis said.
Apostolis said the expo’s student leadership team and the Center for Career Services began planning this year’s expo as soon as last year’s ended. He said they responded to student feedback — collected through forms after last semester’s expo — by expanding the expo to twice a year and furthering outreach to student organizations through posts to the expo and SGA Instagram.
Apostolis said this year’s expo featured a table where SGA senators from the Mental Health Assembly — an SGA committee aimed at raising awareness of mental health resources on campus — helped students stressed by the pressure of speaking to employers by playing games and walking them through the process of interacting with employees.
“We realized that students find it very stressful sometimes the day of, and we’ve seen students that were not comfortable going to the expo,” Apostolis said.
Apostolis said students expressed interest in working on Capitol Hill in their feedback, which led the team to add the “Working on the Hill” panel on Thursday, which featured alumni who had experience working as campaign researchers and committee staffers in the House of Representatives.
The “Search Strategies for International Students” panel held Wednesday in the University Student Center included international GW alumni Yan Xu and John Yang, who advised international students on how to network and navigate visa sponsorship restrictions.
Apostolis said international students had expressed struggling to find jobs last year, which led the expo to add the panel.
Paige McLean — a university relations manager from Interstride, an online resource designed to assist international students through aggregate listings for “international-friendly” jobs — presented a demo Thursday about how to use the free platform. McLean said the GW Interstride page is now available to students to start the job discovery process.
McLean advised international students to use the platform to find alternative job opportunities in the event that they don’t receive their first choice, citing personal experiences as an international student when her employer rejected her H-1B — a visa that allows foreign workers to work in the United States for up to six years — her first day in the role.
“If I didn’t find something within that time frame, I would technically be deported,” McLean said. “So I found something, COVID hit seven months later and that role was cut, so then on that current visa I had 90 days to find a solution.”
Mashrur Wasek, an international graduate student from Bangladesh who attended the expo, said he noticed an increase in the number of employers who said they were willing to hire international students, as compared to expos he attended in previous years.
“I don’t have any connections in America because it is my first time here,” Wasek said. “These sort of events help me network, so more of this will help expand my network in the long run.”
Lanna Megerdichian, a junior majoring in international business, said she was disappointed by the lack of employment sectors represented at Friday’s fair, specifically in the marketing field. She said some employers “rejected” her because she was not the major they were looking for, and she wished there had been more tables catered to students with interests in social media and marketing.
The expo’s page on Handshake shows about 16 results for employers who were present at the fair and were open to hiring marketing majors specifically.
“I talked to a few tables, and they wouldn’t even consider me as an applicant because I wasn’t a certain major,” Megerdichian said.
Veronica Simpson, a graduate student majoring in Asian studies, said the employers at the expo did not align completely with her career goals in culture studies, but she still wanted to participate in the fair for general networking opportunities.
“I feel like Asian studies is already kind of a niche major in its own, so when I was looking at the employers, there’s some possibilities but nothing that I really had a desire for,” Simpson said. “But I wanted to come out and see what could come from this opportunity and maybe find something that actually suits me.”
Renee Wellman — the executive director of Green Corps, an organization that offers one-year grassroots community organizing training to recent college graduates — said the expo is a crucial part of recruitment for her organization because it helps employees interact with the applicant pool in person.
“I think it’s really important to talk to people face-to-face,” Wellman said. “This is especially important for Green Corps because we’re a pretty unique program. I think being able to answer questions is a really critical part of our recruitment strategy.”
Tom Myers, an audit and assurance partner with tax and financial services company GRF CPAs & Advisors, said the expo helps his company gain exposure to students interested in the company and get applicants involved in the hiring process earlier.
“That’s kind of been the trend for many years. I’ve done a lot of career fairs at my previous firm, Maryland, Virginia Tech,” Myers said. “It’s just getting to know students early, get them in the process, allow them to get to know us a little bit, make it easier for everybody to make a decision on both sides.”
