(Spencer J Eggers/ The Daily Campus)
Approximately 600 students and 180 employers attended the Career and Internship Fair in the Hughes-Trigg ballrooms Thursday afternoon.
The event, which takes place once each semester, featured a total of 94 companies this year.
Darin Ford, director for the Hegi Family Career Development Center, said this semester’s fair had a “significant turnout” compared to previous years.
“In the past, we’ve been ecstatic to have 80 to 85 [companies] consistently,” Ford said. “To go over that mark is really a coup for us this year.”
Ranging from Lockheed Martin to In-N-Out Burger, companies at the event were looking to hire students of all majors, in addition to the usual business, marketing and engineering students.
“We usually get about 60 to 50 employers who hire out of liberal arts and out of Meadows [School of the Arts] and Simmons [School of Education and Human Development],” Ford said. “Seventy-five percent of all these employers hire multiple majors, so we’re really proud of that.”
Markets and culture and Spanish double major Matthew Ver Beek, a senior at SMU, attended the fair with the hopes of securing a position in marketing or sales with Southwest Airlines.
“I want to find another internship for the spring,” Ver Beek said.
SMU sophomore Megan Hendricks, a finance and economics major, also attended the event in search of an internship. Hendricks said she talked to about five companies.
“I’m talking to a mix of everybody,” Hendricks said. “I’m just looking for a financial internship, so I’m trying to talk to any company that’s offering that.”
ExxonMobil recruiter Brittney Honora, who graduated from SMU in 2008, said the company usually refers one or two people from the career fair to internship, full-time undergraduate and MBA positions each.
“At the end of the day, we know most of the students that go here make good grades and can do the work, but we want to see who’s going to be a good fit with our company,” Honora said. “Those are the type of people we want to take another look at and ask to interview later on.”
Recruiter for Exchange, an Army and Air Force exchange service, Grace Johnson said SMU students who attend the career fair are always “very professional.”
“We always love SMU students,” Johnson said. “We can tell by the preparation of the students, from their dressing to them being prepared with their resumes, that the school does a good job of creating awareness that the career fair is going on.”
