The Career Fair is over...now what?

I have mixed feelings on how the Career Fair went for me. I was a little frustrated by the fact that the few companies I was really interested in talking to seemed to have the longest lines, but some of the conversations I had seemed to go pretty well.

There was one company there that I had been interested in in the past (I'm pretty sure I've blogged about contacting them) but didn't seem to have a lot of luck with. However, I got to talk to one of the recruiters who happened to be a WPI alum from a few years ago. While looking at my resume he was pretty optimistic because we had the same advisor, same major and concentration, same classes, and were involved in the same engineering community service project. (The only reason why we hadn't worked on the project together was because I didn't join until part way through my sophomore year.) Although they weren't looking for this type of intern at the fair, he encouraged me to check the career page on their website and if I found something talk to him and have my advisor talk to him. He said his boss was a WPI alum with similar credentials so they like hiring people with the same background. It was slightly disappointing that they weren't currently looking for that type of intern, I was happy to make this connection because a lot of times I feel like recruiters will just say something along the lines of "I'll take your resume and appy online" and that's it. This is definitely an opportunity I need to follow up on.



I also talked to another company that I was sort of interested in. They had a few internships avaliable and made medical equipment. The recruiter I talked to was really friendly and gave me her email address so I'll have to follow up with this company too. It's always good to have options. :)

Only two days until the Career Fair!

I can't believe the Career Fair is only two days away!! I'm a little nervous about it because I really need a summer internship, (so this is an important opportunity) and I still have a lot of work to do in terms of researching the companies that are coming...but, with that being said, I'm feeling a lot better about this Career Fair than Career Fairs in the past. Why? Because I've already been to a few. A Career Fair can be an overwhelming experience if you've never been to one before, but after one or two you get the hang of your elevator speech and you're more comfortable talking to recruiters. So, even if you're not looking for an internship like the rest of us, it's helpful to at least go and get a feel for what a Career Fair is like so that you're more comfortable when you finally do need to make a good first impession.

Does anyone else feel like they have 2398 things to do?

So I'm finally in the swing of C term. I've already had my first round of homework and tests in my classes, and PQP is really starting to pick up. (We are basically writing a draft of our whole proposal in a week and I feel like we haven't even finished doing background research!). With all of the work that I've been doing for PQP and ID2050 I'm really looking forward to going to Australia. To top it off, I've been talking to kids who went there last year on IQP, so hearing about their experiences and all of the fun things to do makes me want to go even more.

Unfortunately, before I leave there's still so much I need to do (in addition to passing my classes and PQP of course)

1. Make a packing list/pack/somehow acquire adapters. (I'm flying to Australia with 4 other kids and we decided to leave from Boston less than 24 hours after we finish finals. What were we thinking when we bought plane tickets?!?)
2. Get an MQP. I've been talking to my advisor since part way through freshman year about what I'm interested in and I already informally talked to him about doing an MQP with him last term - but I still need to officially apply and make sure everything is all set before I leave for IQP because once I leave I won't be back at WPI until senior year. Weird. (Even typing that makes me slightly uncomfortable. College is flying by and I'm not quite ready to grow up yet haha.)
3. Get an internship. Okay, well obviously that's the goal, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to pull it off before the beginning of D term. However, I need to do a lot of work so I've at least contacted more companies and made progress towards making sure I have something to do this summer. (Even though I have a lot to do with classes right now, anything I get done now will be easier than when I'm 10,500 miles away and dealing with a 14 hour time difference.)

For your entertainment:

When I was looking for the distance between Worcester and Melbourne, Australia I originally tried to use Google maps. Bad idea. Google decided to give me driving directions that takes about 57 days and involves KAYAKING thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean. (Not by boat or plane, but kayak. Really? hahah.) Plus a good portion of the directions are in Japanese. If you want to see how ridiculous the journey would be if you took Google's advice, check out the link below. Enjoy!

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=worcester%2C%20ma%20to%20melbourne%2C%20australia%20distance&oq=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl