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Students ambivalent about annual NUS career fair |
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By Wendy Kong
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Feb. 3 2012 |
This time every year, final-year students at the National University of Singapore flood the multi-purpose halls for the annual NUS career fair. Held Feb. 2 this year, the career fair gives students the opportunity to interact with a host of companies from many different industries.
Amid the gloomy economic outlook, NUS Career Centre has managed to attract 170 companies to take part in this year’s career fair, a significant increase as compared to 145 companies who were present the year before.
In an email circular addressed to the whole school, Associate Professor Tan Teck Koon said that he hoped that the lineup of recruitment events would help students “gear up in [their] job search and career preparation” in this period of uncertainty.
Chemical Engineering student Ang Cheng Luan said that the human interaction between recruiters and students was useful as “company profile and culture are things that you cannot see online.”
Ng Liting from Economics echoed this sentiment.
“I think it expanded my horizon because I learnt a lot about what the companies do. The career fair also enabled me to gain a better idea of what I wanted liked and disliked,” she said.
Ng suggested that the fair include more firms from a variety of industries because most of the participating companies were either based in the public sector or asked for qualifications above second upper class honors.
For second-year sociology student Chee Hui Ming, knowing what type of students employers prefer was the key.
“Polytechnic students graduate a semester earlier. This is my last chance to get a feel of what employers are looking for.”
However, some students felt that the career fair had not enough to offer.
An applied mathematics who declined to be named said that “I felt that there was nothing much because a lot of jobs are not very relevant to my major”.
When asked to comment about the career fair, a recruiter who declined to be named said that she hoped that the fair would help to brand their company as a highly sought after employer and aid them in recruitment of fresh graduates.
Unlike previous years, there would be two different sets of potential employers participating in this year’s fair. Students who missed the Feb. 2 fair can look forward to another on Feb. 8.
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