Edit: Wrote this post a month ago but for some reason I forgot to post it!

I recently attended the Winter Job Fair and the Disciplines of Engineering Career Fair (DECaF) held at UCSD where hundreds of companies and prospective employees go to network and hopefully land a job. I went with the same intention of networking with a bunch of companies to see if I could land a job (since I’ve been unemployed for about a couple months now out of school).

I see plenty of students argue that these career fairs aren’t that useful for landing your next job because you sometimes have to wait hours in line just for the company representatives to tell you to apply online. Although this is somewhat true, I still feel like going to career fairs give you a necessary skill of networking.

I started attending career fairs in my freshman year of college, where I had no experience besides the few intro to CS classes I had. Of course, it was difficult to talk to recruiters because I had nothing in common. But even in that moment, I was able to network and learn what it takes for the next career fair and kept that attitude until I gained the confidence to network like it’s nothing.

In the last career fairs I attended, I was overjoyed to hear a Yahoo representative tell me that I am a confident and comfortable person and that I would be able to pursue anything I wanted to do. (except for the Yahoo job because there is a strict GPA cutoff of 3.5). With that said, all those years of going to career fairs paid off because I secured interviews from more than half of the companies I talked to.

So keep going to those career fairs, and keep learning!