If you know where to look, GW has several helpful career resources for students to choose from. The catch is that you have to know they exist in the first place.

That discovery comes too late for far too many students, and usually through a chance encounter. A friend may mention they scheduled a time with the F. David Fowler Career Center, or a professor will casually drop the name of an industry contact or upcoming networking event. As a result, by the time students hear about these services, they’ve oftentimes already spent weeks fumbling through the job search on their own, trying strategies that didn’t quite work, missing windows they didn’t know were open. Students try various strategies to secure a job, whether by approaching staff members to find on-campus work or attending as many career fairs as possible, but without institutional support, these strategies often prove ineffective. 

This isn’t the result of a lack of career resources on campus, as some students contend. On April 20, the Fowler Center hosted a School of Business Alumni Mixer aimed at connecting graduate students with alumni who could offer real guidance on navigating a tough job market. Officials also hosted the fall 2025 career expo in September, offering students the opportunity to meet recruiters from over 50 employers. The problem: turnout at both fell short, with the career expo seeing a significant drop in student participation and only about 20 students attending the Fowler Mixer. These are not isolated incidents, but the symptoms of a structural issue. GW’s career services have a marketing problem. Students who would have benefited most from these events simply didn’t know about it, or didn’t hear about it in time to show up.

The resources exist. The communication doesn’t.

Most of what I’ve learned about GW’s career support hasn’t come from any official channel, but from offhand comments in class, conversations with other students who happened to know about an externship at the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund or stumbling across something after it was almost too late to use it.

It’s a pattern: students find out a tool would have been useful right around the time it stops being useful.

This also creates unequal use of the resources. The lucky few students who figure the system out early, usually because they were already confident enough to ask around or came in knowing how institutions like this work, get a real head start. They’re applying earlier, networking sooner and walking into recruiting season better prepared. Everyone else is catching up. In a job market this difficult for new graduates, that gap is hard to close once it opens. The job market is experiencing a “frozen state” that has low hiring and turnover, with employer hiring at the lowest rate since 2013. While top-line unemployment remains low at 4.3 percent with 178,000 jobs added in March, hiring is slow, layoffs are increasing and long-term unemployment is rising.

GW currently has the first year experience class that all first year students have to take, which is meant to introduce students to GW and the services they offer. While the class may provide students with one-time help building a resume, rarely does it expose students to the institutional resources GW offers for actually finding employment in a specific field. If the one mandatory touchpoint GW has with every single freshman isn’t carrying this information, that’s not a gap in the system. That’s the system failing at its most basic job. The first-year experience course was supposed to help with exactly this kind of orientation. But even that hasn’t consistently done the job of laying out what career services are available and when students should be using them. 

GW has plenty of resources, but the issue is those resources are not fully integrated in students’ everyday experience at the University, but rather are services students must proactively seek out themselves. Career support needs to show up earlier, more consistently and in context, rather than buried in a mass email or mentioned once at orientation. A first-year student doesn’t need the same guidance as a senior preparing to graduate, and treating them the same way guarantees that neither gets what they need. Some professors already understand this — building resume submissions, headshots or portfolio work directly into their courses so students stay ready without having to seek it out themselves. That instinct is right, and it should be more widespread.

With GW’s cost of attendance climbing toward $100,000, students should feel confident that their education is preparing them for lucrative career opportunities once they leave college. The University owes them more than a list of services they might eventually stumble across. Career readiness shouldn’t depend on who you happen to sit next to in class or whether you were bold enough to ask the right question at the right time.

In a place that’s supposed to prepare students for what comes next, it shouldn’t feel like a lucky break when someone figures out where to start.

Chiraura Trinity Mapendere, a graduate student studying interdisciplinary business, is an opinions writer.