Career Fair Dinner¶
The student favorite Career Fair Dinner is a semi-formal dinner from 6 pm - 9pm the night of the career fair that gives students and companies the opportunity to interact for longer than a 2-minute career fair interaction. Companies send representatives to talk to students about their comapany, take resumes, and answer any questions the students have. The representatives rotate throughout the night so that students talk to each company atleast once but never the same representative throuhgout the night.
General Preperation¶
5 Months Before¶
- Invite companies - Send out invitations for companies to attend the dinner. I would recommend securing yeses from 6 companies for an expected 60 people to attend the dinner (5:1 student:company representative ratio).
3 Months Before¶
- Secure the Venue - Ordinarly, we use Alex’s pizza and tell them we will need 1/2 of the bar.
2 Weeks Before¶
- Advertise - Create a flier and advertise the event to students through the newsletter, contacting professors to speak in classes, and hanging them up in the CS building.
1 Week Before¶
- Follow up - Follow up with each of the companies to ensure they are still coming and sending the number of representitives they originally stated. Be sure to include the date, time, and location on the email. Moreover, follow up with the venue to ensure that the reservation is confirmed.
Career Fair Day¶
- Touch Base - Stop by each of the companies who said they were attending the talk and touch base. Thank them for saying the would come and make sure they don’t have any final questions.
- Placards - Make placards for each representative of each company. The placards will act as a marker to where each company representative will sit at the beginning. Put a table number at the top of each placard in sequential order or where they will rotate to. This will allow companies to easily know where they need to go to next. Examples can be found in figma.
Warning
The placard example should not be followed exactly as it puts representatives from each company right after eachother. Make sure to spread companies out so that students don’t have to talk to the same company twice in a row.
Day After¶
- Feedback Survey - Send a feedback survey to all companies / students who attended to see what they enjoyed about the event and what they would have liked to change.
Agenda¶
3:00 pm - Make placards for each representative of each company who is attending the event. Placard examples/considerations can be found above.
5:30 pm - Arrive at the venue and and perform that following preparations:
- Setup the placards so that each representative has 5 open seats around them. Attempt to stagnate the placards for each company such that students don’t have to talk to the same company twice in a row. For example, if you have 2 representatives from ACM and 12 total representatives, put the ACM representatives at 1 and 6 to give plenty of spacing.
- Appoint someone to verify that each person coming for the dinner is an ACM member.
- Show each representative where to sit when they arrive (where you have placed the placards).
- Begin ordering pizzas so they appear when the dinner starts.
- Connect to a TV with HDMI or have some way to display a large timer to all the attendees. Set the time on the timer to be equal to the time each rotation will take / time until next announcement.
6:00 pm - Allow everyone to filter in.
6:15 pm - Quiet everyone down and explain the event. Allow each company to introduce themselves, what they do, who they brought to the event, etc. Make sure there is enough food that everyone has eaten.
6:30 pm - Start the rotations and make a rotation every n/2.5 hrs or x/2.5 hrs where n is the number of companies and x is the number of people. Start ASAP to allow the most amount of time for students and companies to talk.
8:15 pm - Hand out the checks to the companies.
8:30 pm - If you see people starting to filter out, make sure to thank everyone for coming and give the companies a round of applause.