By snoadmin
More than 309 booths, representing some of the top engineering companies in the country, were packed onto the second floor of the University Student Union (USU) during the Engineering, Science and Technology Fair on Wednesday.
The event gave engineering students and companies the chance get to know each other and interact.
Dave Wesselman, a representative from Roel Construction Company, stood with his hands in his pockets in front of a large poster of the company name. “This is our second year here,” Wesselman said. “We usually get a really good mix of students. You get a lot more people here than you do at like Cal Poly or Fullerton. We usually find a lot of really good people here – a lot of people who fit our company.”
Recruitment Officer Octavius Wiley stood in front of the Army’s booth, ready to greet interested students.
“Well, what we are trying to find are graduate students, potential officers in the Army. We want people who want to get out of the country, get out of Southern California and see things, see the world,” Wiley said. “Any job you could get in the civilian world you can find here: biomedical; biochemistry; chemical engineering; anything.”
Although the room was filled with booths, many students felt opportunities offered by the vendors were fairly similar across the board. Pawan Taparia, a computer science graduate student, said the fair was not as good or as diverse as it has been in the past.
“To be perfectly honest, [the] convention really isn’t as good as it was last year,” Taparia said. “They had more booths that could accommodate more majors. Now, it seems like all they have are booths dealing with construction and design and almost no booths that deal with computer science. It would be nice to see companies like Google or Yahoo here. I have no idea why the Career [Development] Center didn’t try and broaden what companies actually participated.”
Sanjay Srechari had the same reaction.
“I came to this college from India to study engineering,” he said. “This conference is great, but there are almost no companies here that are global, that work with people who are not citizens. I think next year it would be great if they got more multinational companies to attend. That would really help.”
