By: Tanya Kett & Jillian Perkins Marsh
Some say that when they last attended a job fair employers told them to apply online, so they felt it was pointless to attend. If you have similar sentiments, I urge you to keep reading.
Employers may tell you to apply online (it does save paper!), but the real reason they are there is to get a sense of the person behind the resume that is submitted online — YOU.
Who are you? What do you have to offer? Why are you unique? Are you personable? Do you seem genuinely interested? What do you know about them? Answers to these questions can only be conveyed in an application to a certain extent. Make a real connection so that when your application does come across their desk, your name gets noticed.
How can you differentiate your application from other ones in the application pile?
Do your research. Explore the event website for the list of employers confirmed to attend and do some research on them before the event.
Tailor your elevator pitch. Make eye contact and shake their hand. Be bold, assertive, and with some confidence, introduce yourself. Tell them what you do or want to do, what you have to offer and why you are interested in them. Customize your pitch based on your research.
Ask useful questions. Based on your research, prepare some thoughtful questions to generate conversation after your introductions.
Be an active listener. Really listen to what they have to say; it is easy to start thinking ahead to what you will say next, but concentrate on being in the moment. After the conversation is over, jot down any suggestions they had for applicants before you forget.
Be ready to dig deeper. If you encounter an organization of interest that is not hiring in the area you are interested in, don’t despair. Remember that organizations recruit for many diverse roles and hiring timelines are often not predictable.
Invite to connect on LinkedIn. Visit your new contact’s profile and send your request from there, so you have an option to ‘Add a Note.’ Reference something from your conversation when you invite them to connect and thank them for their time in speaking with you at the event.
After you attend the event and employ the tactics above, you are ready to submit that online application. Don’t forget to mention the contact you spoke with at the Career Fair or Company Recruitment Event. Incorporate their suggestions and offer something you learned from them in your cover letter as part of why you are interested in applying.
Now imagine you did none of the above, just attended, had a few conversations and just applied online. Which application would you be most interested in?
Use what you’ve learned in this article at our SCENE networking night on March 21. This event is open to McMaster alumni and students in their final year. Register here: alumni.mcmaster.ca under Event Listings.
Read the full article on our Medium page.
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January marks the beginning of a new semester filled with new classes. While course enrolment for both fall and winter terms occurred in the summer, students have until the end of the drop-and-add period on Jan. 15 to enrol in courses for the current term. Or, at least, they can attempt to.
McMaster University students enrol in courses through Mosaic, the university’s administrative information system. For fall and winter course enrolment, students may only enrol in courses after their enrolment appointment opens, which is dependent on their academic level. For example, during registration for the 2018-2019 academic term, students in level five had enrolment appointments beginning June 19 whereas students in level one had appointments beginning June 27.
Each student is randomly assigned an enrolment appointment within their academic level which allows the process of course enrolment to be fair while giving necessary priority to upper-year students who have limited time to fulfil their degree requirements.
While the current system provides students equal opportunity to enrol in courses, due to the nature of course enrolment, it is often the case that students wish to enrol in classes that have reached capacity. This could be to fulfil requirements for post-undergraduate programs, satisfy their minor requirements, allow for the option to take advanced classes in the future, or merely out of interest.
Just as there are many reasons why students wish to enrol in full classes, there are many reasons why classes have caps on enrolment — limitations in room sizes and the necessity of reserved space for certain program majors, for example — but what makes little sense is the university’s lack of offering a waitlist for full classes.
As it stands, any students wishing to enrol in full classes is recommended to “keep checking back on Mosaic to see if a seat has opened up”. This recommendation is frankly a waste of students’ time with little reward; students have no guarantee that consistently checking their enrolment cart will result in enrolment in their desired course, even if spaces became available.
The alternative is to contact the instructor of the course and ask for special permissions to join however this again cannot guarantee student enrolment and success varies dependent on the course and instructor. Instructors also cannot be expected to respond to all student requests and essentially manage the administrative details of their course. Instead, waitlists should be created and used to facilitate course enrolment.
Other universities such as Carleton University have clearly-defined policies surrounding course registration waitlists. While not all courses at Carleton have waitlists set-up, those that do operate in a consistent manner.
Once the course has reached capacity, students who have met the course prerequisites and are attempting to enrol are presented with the option to join a waitlist, with those who attempted to enrol in the full course the earliest placed at the top of the list. When space is available, the first student on the waitlist is notified via email and must register for the class within 24 hours. Otherwise, the next student on the waitlist is contacted and so forth.
Although a system like this does not guarantee enrolment, it removes the unnecessary time commitment created by constantly checking Mosaic for available spaces, and ensures the process is fair by not requiring instructor intervention.
Oddly enough, Mosaic appears to have the functionality to support waitlists, showing students on their term’s schedule that their status in a course can be “enrolled”, “dropped”, or “wait listed”. Given then that implementation of waitlists benefits students and does not seemingly require a major system restructure, the question becomes why hasn’t the university offered it?
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Dina Fanara
Assistant News Editor
Each year, McMaster’s Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) joins forces with local stores and vendors of fair trade products to put on the annual Fair Trade Fair in the McMaster University Student Centre (MUSC) atrium.
The fair, which has been taking place for over ten years, shrunk slightly in size this year, but is still going strong.
Products for sale included the usual Fair Trade Certified chocolates, coffee, and tea, jewellery from all over the world, Christmas ornaments, clay and wooden figurines, clothing, journals, soaps, moisturizers and several other odds and ends.
Also present at the Fair was McMaster’s Engineers Without Borders (EWB), promoting Fair Trade Certification awareness, focusing on educating students on the process for products to become certified, and why it is important to purchase Fair Trade products when possible.
According to one EWB volunteer, Meaghan Langille, fair trade “promotes social responsibility by ensuring that that the people who made the product that you’re purchasing were paid a fair wage and ethical working conditions.”
“It’s a great way to promote a global economy,” she said about the event. “It’s something that we can do to help people in developing countries through what we are purchasing and consuming,” said Langille.
It was widely expressed by several vendors that a second-term event, which used to occur but was stopped several years ago, would be greatly beneficial to the cause.
Another suggestion was to add another day to the first-term fair, as many students asked vendors if they would be returning the following day.
