Speaking as an attendee of the Business/Liberal Arts and Sciences Career Fair last Wednesday, I have to say I was unimpressed with both the advertisement of the fair and the lack of variety in jobs available. I have been to career fairs before at Iowa State and to my best knowledge, they have always been organized in the same manner. This year, however, I am now more focused on my career goals for the future — this unfortunately put me at a greater risk for disappointment.

For starters, one factor that caused confusion was the Business/ LAS Career Day was right in the middle of Engineers’ Week. Obviously, someone thought it would be a good idea to have two career days in a row to minimize the task of preparing and tearing down the booths at Hilton Coliseum. I feel slightly depreciated by the organizers of this event through their method of working Business and LAS majors into a schedule that fits their needs but does not take our needs into consideration.

The first real feeling of disappointment came when I received no e-mail or any information about the career fair. My first knowledge of it was from a sign outside the library I saw Tuesday afternoon. Even the Iowa State Daily seemed to keep it in the background. The article told students to “go to Career Day with a game plan, some idea of what to say and a name tag.” However, this article appeared the day of the career fair.

I know that for most people, like myself, this week is cram-packed. Last week and this week have been designated the time for first tests of the semester and first assignments to be due.

Luckily, being an English major, I get the pleasure of having more papers than tests — but this is still a time-consuming matter. With this in mind, a person cannot adequately prepare for an important life-changing event with 12 hours notice, or even 24 hours in my case. Being left to quickly organize how I was going to present myself in a professional manner in one evening’s time, I struggled to fit this into my schedule. Somehow I managed to buy a business suit, create a resume from scratch, check out the Career Day Web site and come up with a list of companies I wanted to meet with and questions to ask. These preparations did not decrease my chance for disappointment once I arrived at the career fair.

The Business/LAS Career Fair Web site allowed students to search for companies by major. This seems like a very useful tool. I did this and copied down the six companies that stated they would accept English majors. Out of all six companies I talked with, none of them were looking for employing someone with these particular skills but were instead accepting all majors. Also, there were companies that had people who focused on communications, but there was no one available to talk to me about this position. I was then given a pamphlet and directed to the company’s homepage.

Another problem I had with the career fair was the lack of variety in the companies that participated. Business and Liberal Arts and Sciences covers a broad range of majors. LAS covers majors like biology, computer science, foreign languages, music, psychology and statistics — all very different career fields. The career fair was overly off-centered in their focus area and catered mostly to people looking for a management position. Even if these career positions take up the majority of the job market, a career fair run by a school needs to provide opportunities to all its students.

Either Iowa State needs to start leaning more of its classes toward management, a more diverse variety of companies need to be shown to us or we need to be told up front what to expect from companies. A simple description on the company Web site of what employees the company is looking for would have helped considerably and would have decreased the amount of time wasted by students expecting to find a career at the career fair within their focused major.

I will not hold onto the four pamphlets, informative company CD and business cards I received at the career fair. I will not spend more of the small amount of time I have to look into the communications departments of these companies. I will instead put this learning experience behind me and continue looking for a company that suits my career needs without all the hassles.