The North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University students attended Howard University’s Job Fair last Thursday.
Last Thursday Howard University’s School of Communications held its annual job fair. About 50 communication based companies gathered on Howard’s campus to meet and have mini-interviews with students. Although the job fair was held on Howard’s campus, other universities came to take part. Professor Gale Wiggins brought a group of A&T students to the job fair. In order to be able to go you had to be a member of the A&T chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).
The job fair had someone for every concentration in journalism. Newspapers such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, to name a few, were there for those with a print concentration. For those interested in broadcast, television stations such as ABC, CNN, and NBC were there. Graduate schools such as Columbia, were there for upperclassmen looking to apply. Organizations that specialize in placing students into different media internships were also at the fair. There were also PR firms, radio stations, as well as companies that have something for everyone like MTV and Disney.
“Howard’s School of Communications is able to attract a larger crowd of companies than a lot of other colleges and universities, so we come here to take advantage of the opportunity they are able to create”, says A&T Register editor-in-chief Dexter Mullins.
Mullins was part of the group of A&T students that met outside Crosby Hall at 6 a.m. in the morning to take the five hour drive to Howard University. It took one van and three cars to transport the group. Kelcie McCray is a sophomore at A&T, “It was funny because we all carried our clothes in garment bags so we wouldn’t get our suits wrinkled. When we stopped at the McDonalds by Howard to change we all walked into the bathrooms looking a mess and walked out looking like a group of entrepreneurs! The people at McDonalds were looking as if they could not tell if we were the same group that had just come in.”
A few of A&T’s seniors left the fair with interviews at certain graduate schools, and most of the A&T students left DC with internship/job leads, irreplaceable contacts, and an amazing networking experience. Alessandra Brown, a junior at A&T who attended the fair, pointed out, “A lot of us got the chance to not only show, but give our work to very important figures in the journalism industry. Those of us who write for the Register put together packets of our work and resumes to give out to different companies. The representatives at the fair seemed very impressed.”
Another A&T junior, Joseph Escobar said this, “I thought the career fair was extremely beneficial. The exposure was great and it was well worth the six hour drive that we took. I feel that Ms. Wiggins and the rest of the Journalism Department did a very good job at preparing the students for future success as we met with representatives from some of the world’s top media sources.”
Escobar isn't the only person who praised A&T for its students work in journalism. “One woman in particular was looking at the PDF’s of the A&T Register that were in my portfolio and exclaimed, ‘This is way better than the Hilltop (Howard’s student newspaper)!’. She said it loud enough for others to here, it felt good to show the Howard students that A&T is competition.” said Mullins.
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