Connor Greca, a chemical engineering major at Michigan Technological University, talks with Ryan Legato of General Motors during Fall Career Fest on Tuesday. This year’s fair featured 387 companies, with General Motors returning to the fair for the first time since 2018. (Garrett Nease/Daily Mining Gazette)
HOUGHTON — Michigan Technological University held its largest job fair ever Tuesday at the Student Development Complex.
Cody Kangas, executive director of career services at Tech, said 387 companies registered for the fall job fair, filling 415 tables.
“This is definitely a record-breaking year,” he said, “and the quality, the richness, the depth of what they’re looking for and where these companies are coming from is just incredible.”
The multipurpose room was packed with about 50 of the university’s strategic partners, including companies such as Boston Scientific, which is recruiting biomedical engineering students, and General Motors, which was returning to campus for the first time since 2018.
Other businesses were housed on the floors and balconies of the SDC gym.
Michigan Tech talks with companies on the balcony of the SDC gym during its fall career fair on Tuesday. (Garrett Nease/Daily Mining Gazette)
It’s not just big companies: 100 of the companies visited Tuesday had fewer than 100 employees, Kangas said. To find the right balance between industry and company size, Tech is advertising through its Handshake platform, which reaches 80,000 companies, Kangas said. It’s also working with partners on campus to find companies in each department that might be looking for specific types of talent.
“Each college on campus is represented in some way,” Kangas said, “and there’s an obvious bias towards engineering and computing, but overall there’s a very wide range of companies here, looking at all disciplines: business, engineering, science.”
Tech is trying to attract as many employers as possible from Michigan and the Midwest region. Kangas showed a heat map showing Detroit, the Twin Cities and Green Bay in dark red.
The wide range of businesses attracted an equally wide range of students: Nearly 40 percent of campus had preregistered for the fair, Kangas said. Once the doors opened, it took 17 minutes for the assembled student body to get through.
“Our students want fulfilling careers,” he said. “They want to graduate with a degree, get a credential and get to work right away. And our employers tell us time and time again that Michigan Tech talent is industry-ready.”
One such example is Chicago-based steel company Zekelman Industries, whose recent projects include the Las Vegas Sphere and the Dallas Cowboys stadium, which is participating in the fair for the first time and has decided to become a gold sponsor.
The company does a lot of work in automation, robotics and programmable logic controllers and “has a real need for technology students,” said Andrea Seymour, vice president of talent acquisition.
Their first interaction with the tech world came last summer, when they worked with an intern who was doing “phenomenal” work on automation at one of the company’s oldest manufacturing plants.
“He took some of the scrap wood we had on-site and automated a process that was very difficult for us to do,” Seymour says. “I found out he was a student at Michigan Tech, so I reached out to them and said, ‘We need more. How many more do you have? We need more.'”
Seymour said Zekelman has the “ideal demographic” of electrical engineering and mechatronics students he is looking for.
“These are exactly the types of people we want to see as the future of our company,” she said. “These are the students we want to focus on. We want them to stay with us and take us to the next level.”
Clarissa Peters, a first-year chemical engineering student, came to Japan to gain experience, ease her nerves and build relationships with potential employers in preparation for her next trip back home.
She has a promising meeting with Sappi Paper and also has an interview scheduled with Shawano Paper.
For her first fair, Peters prepared extensively: She attended every Career Services event and practiced her elevator pitch with friends “over and over and over.”
After deciding which companies she wanted to approach, she thoroughly researched them and thought about what would make her want the position.
Peters’ interview at Sapiente came after they noticed she was a chemical engineering major on her badge and approached her.
“It happened out of the blue,” she said, “and I wasn’t prepared for it, but I was happy.”
Next year, Peters plans to focus more on her particular interests as she figures out her career path — but the path hasn’t been as scary as she feared.
“I haven’t spoken to any major companies yet, but the small businesses are coming to talk to me and they’re happy to be here and they’ve actually been very kind, so there’s no need to be so scared,” she said.
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