Junior Caucus Hosts Career Fair at Stuyvesant

The Junior Caucus hosted a Career Fair on Friday, May 18 to educate and expose students to careers and various fields of study. Junior Caucus President Julia Lee and Vice President Amit Narang, who promoted this event as one of their campaign promises, brought this event to fruition with assistance from Internship Coordinator Harvey Blumm, Alumni Association Chief of Operations Yanjie Hao, Junior Caucus Event Coordinator Britni Canale, and Junior Caucus Chief Executive Diana Sattarova.

Narang wanted to organize the Career Fair so that the student body could be in an environment where they would be surrounded by knowledgeable professionals in various fields. “There’s not a lot of interaction between successful adults and the students of Stuyvesant,” Narang said. “I don’t have access to those types of connections, I don’t know any professionals in the environments that I want to work in, and I know that the majority of Stuyvesant feels the same way.”

To plan the event, Narang went to SLT meetings and pitched his idea to the Parents Association. He then got in contact with Blumm to help coordinate the event. Blumm helped Narang get in touch with Hao, who reached out to alumni from the Alumni Association’s mentoring program.

The 20 alumni who participated in the fair were sorted by profession, with two or three assigned to each room. Representatives working in fields such as business, medicine, engineering, and technology were present at the event. Every 20 minutes, students would go to different rooms with careers that they were interested in, with five-minute intervals between the sessions. The sessions comprised of a 15-minute presentation from the alumni, with the last five minutes dedicated to answering questions from students. A question asked of alumni was what they wished they had known during the beginning of their career.

Though the Career Fair was open to students of all grade levels, it was targeted toward upperclassmen, who are heading off to college and considering college majors. However, students felt that most of the careers discussed were disproportionately focused on STEM majors, or even business and finance, and not enough on other areas like art or technology. “A lot of Stuy[vesant] kids kind of have these fixed ideas of what they want to be, [...] they kind of overlook all the other possible careers that may be better suited for them,” Narang said. As Stuyvesant is often viewed as a STEM-focused school, students may feel like they do not get as many opportunities to be exposed to humanities-oriented fields. “[The fair introduced] them to new things, because you might want to do medicine, but meet an artist and fall in love with it,” Lee said.

Students felt that the careers that were discussed did help, but the issue seemed to lie in the distribution of the careers discussed. Kate Shen, a junior, didn’t feel that the fair gave enough attention to her interests: “They didn’t really have a topic I really wanted, like art […] I would definitely go next year if they had, like, another department, besides, just, you know, the generic, like, STEM programs, bio, or like finance programs. I would like them to maybe expand on it a little more.” The fair also provided a means for students to network, find opportunities, and learn more about the career they were planning to go into.

The Career Fair was all around received positively by the student body, with around 300 students attending. Junior Christine Kim judged the experience positively: “I also knew which field I wanted to go to, but I wasn’t really sure exactly where, and this was really helpful.” While Shen was not as satisfied with her time at the Career Fair, she knew a lot of people who felt that the experience was worthwhile. “My friends, because they knew they wanted to go into the medical field, they felt that they were opened up to what the atmosphere is like, and what being a medical person is all about. So that was pretty helpful for them, they learned a lot,” she said.

This year’s Career Fair was not the first one hosted at Stuyvesant. Blumm helped coordinate a Career Fair five or seven years ago. However, the fair had not been as successful. During that Career Fair, there were only seven to eight alumni with 200 students. The Junior Caucus decided to improve on the previous year’s model by changing the structure of the event to include more one-on-one interactions between attendees and alumni. “[The previous Career Fair] wasn’t as satisfying for students because they couldn’t really ask questions and get follow-up. They were up on the stage and the kids were down on the theater,” Blumm said. They decided to model the revised Career Fair after College Night, where students had the freedom to pick what room they wanted to go to and have more one-on-one contact with the alumni.

Junior Caucus plans to improve on the Career Fair for next year. “Just like how we improved from the days when Career Fair was in the theater, we’re still constantly learning and we took so many notes on what happened, and what we need to improve,” Lee said.

The Junior Caucus took note of some issues that arose at the fair, such as the prominence of STEM-related careers at the fair, and the lack of humanities-related careers. “They didn’t really have a topic I really wanted, like art,” Shen said. “I would definitely go next year if they had another department, besides [...] the generic [...] STEM programs.” Possibly as a result of the unequal distribution of careers, some students also found the event to be a bit chaotic and disorderly. “It was disorganized, in the way that you couldn’t really tell when the sessions ended,” Kim said. The Junior Caucus and other coordinators of the event plan to select a more diverse range of careers and improve for the next Career Fair.

Overall, the caucus is enthusiastic about the outcome of Career Fair and how it was run. “It was a learning experience, there were some pick up, but nothing went wrong, and I just feel really good that we pushed it through, and that the alumni and students felt that it was helpful,” Canale said.