Over 75 recruiters, 25 industry companies and two graduate school programs filled the Bethancourt Ballroom at Texas A&M University’s Memorial Student Center, where 500 students pitched their resumes in hopes of securing an internship at the first chemical engineering career fair.
The Texas A&M American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE) student chapter hosted the event in collaboration with the Artie McFerrin Department of Engineering on Sept. 12.
“It really was a great opportunity to give back to the students just as much as the students before in AIChE have done for us,” said Emiliano Alcazar Zamora, AIChE Career Fair deputy director. “It feels great to be able to reciprocate that into the rest of the community and to be able to help in that career aspect for all the rest of the students.”
As the largest AIChE student chapter in the nation, AIChE faculty advisor Dr. Martin Sentmanat said that the career fair was an opportunity for Texas A&M students to showcase their chemical engineering skills while advancing their professional goals.
“This event was wonderfully successful and a truly amazing accomplishment by our students. This is something that the department has been wanting to do for a while, so after our first set of meetings earlier in the year, it was nice to see it all finally come together so well,” Sentmanat said.
The goal for the inaugural year was to attract as many students and industry companies as possible to attend, which Coby Scrudder, AIChE Career Fair director, said was a success.
“I didn't expect this many students, and the recruiters didn't expect this many students,” he said. “Some of our bigger companies only brought maybe two recruiters, and students were waiting in line for 45 minutes to an hour to get a chance to talk to them.”
Before the doors opened at 9 a.m., Scrudder said there was already a line, attributing this to his month-long outreach via word of mouth.
“I went to every single classroom here and made sure that the students knew about the career fair,” he said. “Some of these students were telling me that they've at least heard our spiel about the chemical engineering career fair, three different times, for an entire week. If you set foot in the chemical engineering building, you would know about the chemical engineering career fair.”
Planning for the event began in April, when he reached out to various companies and other students he knew who had completed internships, seeking to establish connections in any possible way.
For many companies, including Contech Control Services, SI Chemicals, Enerflex and Puffer-Sweiven, this was the first time recruiting at Texas A&M.
Additional companies that attended were Samsung Austin Semiconductor, BASF, Honeywell, Dow, Monument Chemical, and Olin.
“We hire a ton of chemical engineers and have always supported Texas A&M, so it felt like a no-brainer,” said Hailey Bennett, Olin Talent Acquisition Specialist: College Recruiting. “We also felt like we might be able to form more personable relationships with students attending.”
Olin plans to attend next year. While at the event, Bennett noticed how engaged and passionate the students were and hoped to foster a partnership with the AIChE group to continue the pipeline of talent for their college recruiting program.
As the team prepares for next year’s career fair, they are analyzing feedback from recruiters and students regarding location, spacing, and dates around the SEC Career Fair, as well as additional companies they would like to consider inviting.
“Right now, we're trying to figure out if there's a better date to host it, essentially before the SEC Career Fair instead of after,” Alcazar Zamora said. “It was a great success seeing all the students who came out to support the event. We're shooting for an even bigger one next year. This one helped us establish ourselves.”
In response to student requests for a pharmaceutical company to speak with next year, the team is exploring companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly and Company, and AstraZeneca, said Isaac Villareal, AIChE president.
Scrudder said next year’s goal is to add 15 to 20 more companies and encourage them to bring more recruiters.
“At the end of the day, if one student gets an internship where they wouldn't have otherwise, then it was worth it,” Scrudder said. “That's a career that I'm indirectly helping out with because who knows where that one internship could lead to in the future.”