More employers join career fair

With resumes in hand, 464 professionally dressed students visited with industry employers attending this fall’s Career Fair.

Susan Story, director of the University Career Center, said more students from the schools of Business and Engineering attended the event than did students from other disciplines.

“We keep trying every year for more students to attend,” she said, adding that

last year about the same number of people visited with potential employers. This year 70 employers participated, while only 50 became involved in last year’s fair.

Employers, she said, liked VCU’s Career Fair because of the traffic flow in the University Student Commons and because it’s situated in Richmond’s downtown area.

“They said our students looked really nice. They looked better and their resumes were better, and we have tried really hard to work on that,” Story said.

Judy H. Gibson, director of human resources at WWBT-TV, represented her station and assisted the Virginia Association of Broadcasters, an organization of television and radio stations in Virginia.

“The job fairs are very well-managed by VCU,” Gibson said.

She spoke to students about summer internships, scholarship programs as well as VAB’s job and resume banks. The fair, Gibson said, has been very helpful in finding interns, and some of those interns eventually become full-time employees.

Students wanting to attend the career fair had to register for a one-hour period between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., which kept the employers from being bombarded with many students simultaneously.

Pamela Johnson, an accounting certificate major, said she was looking for any job in the accounting field but was most interested in companies such as Carmax, World Access, Dominion and the state’s auditor’s office.

Although she arrived near the end of the career fair, Johnson said she was pleased with the way it turned out.

“It was well-planned,” she said. “Most of the representatives there were informative.”