What’s a freshman like me doing at Career Fair? by Michael C. '16

If you’re looking for an in-depth view of Career Fair and all the vast opportunities that it offers MIT students, then you’re in the wrong place.

You see, I’m a freshman, and therefore my current resume consists of things like “can eat five plates of food at dinner”,* “can make psets sound fun“, and “won bronze medal in third grade spelling bee”. “Career” is not really a word in my vocabulary yet, blogging is the closest thing I currently have to a job, and expecting me to have any deep insights about Career Fair right now is kind of like expecting a gorilla to analyze Hamlet, or a Harvard student to solve a math problem.

So I’ll leave the responsible Career Fair blogging to someone more qualified than I.

What I do have, however, is an insatiable desire for free goodies and t-shirts (the technical term is “swag”), and there was plenty of that.

This story starts with me stumbling out of bed Friday morning (we had a Game of Thrones marathon right after the 8.01 exam! not the best idea ever…), remembering that it was Career Fair, and sleepily trudging in my MIT hoodie down the Infinite, not realizing that everyone else was dressed in suits.

My first impression upon entering the Career Fair:

[for the non-MIT people out there: Course 6 is Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), basically the most popular course ever.  For what it’s worth, I’m leaning towards Course 6-7 (computer science and molecular biology) right now, though that is very subject to change]

My second impression: FREE SWAG EVERYWHERE

I didn’t have a third impression because I was too busy claiming free stuff. Say what you will about the counterculture of Senior Haus, but I’m fully willing to sell ad space on my body (and my integrity) for free shirts.

Just look at my haul:

And, of course, I also did manage to learn a thing or twelve from the Career Fair – about what options there are out there for me, about what internships I might be interested in, about what kind of company culture I like (hint: Google is awesome, and not just because they gave me a Chrome beanie. Although I am in love with that beanie. I kind of want the weather to get colder just so I can find an excuse to wear it). And it really is quite amazing to see all these companies, from Apple to Google to Facebook to the NSA, falling over themselves to recruit MIT students. I’ll definitely be taking full advantage of the Career Fair next year, after I get a UROP under my belt.  And a suit and tie to go along with that belt.

*I’ve gotten a few comments about my placing of punctuation outside the quotation marks – to which I say, I subscribe to the British style, which is naturally the more correct one.