So my school had a career fair, and I went.  It was a near surreal experience for me. It felt like a singles bar, but instead of drowning in the smell of axe it was the smell of semi washed bodies.  Instead of top 40’s music blasting out my ears it was the dull roar of a couple hundred really nerd conversations buzzing barely outside of intelligible.

Beyond the novelty of the whole experience, there was this underlying continuous feed of “learn x from this” playing over and over in my head.  I laughed and I cried (not really) and I learned some things about myself (that one for real).

To start, I am BAD at cold conversation.  From the opening “Hi my name is …” to selling myself and interacting with the recruiters about their product.  I very rapidly got the hang of this as I warmed up to the experience, but there were some definite bombs. Sometimes the recruiters even helped me along to avoid me falling too hard on my face, and that was definitely welcomed.

I developed a bit of a flow to the conversations.  Start with introductions, of course. Ask about their tech stack and try to ask some sort of question about what they do and how/why they do it.  At this point if it’s clearly not for me, aka that one security company building software in C for a network switch, I would politely thank them for their time and move on.  Failing that I would then move into my experience and what I was looking for. If they engaged here, and most of them did, I would try to explore a little about the employee and see what they found enjoyable about the workplace.

When typed out like that it looks so easy.  But jeeze it doesn’t capture the level of anxiety and stress I felt at, what was essentially, chatting up total strangers.  Even if there was a very clear reason for the whole interaction it’s still strangely nerve wracking.

Lesson two is simple.  RESEARCH. Look these companies up.  Generally these sorts of things will publish a list of the companies.  Go through that and give each one at least a minimal level of googling.  The few times I’ve been on the companies side of the hiring table it’s nice to know that the candidate cares enough to put some minimal effort in, as well as getting to avoid the whole nuts and bolts of what your company is about is a nice time saver.

It’s a GREAT way to practice the openings of an interview, and I’ll definitely be doing it again as soon as it’s offered.

Have resumes!  I had mine in fancy little cases, and I’m not sure if that was a positive or a negative to be honest…

It’s the career equivalent of a singles bar, so just get out there and enjoy that experience if you get the chance!