So… I actually made it to the Career Fair today: venturing around when it started was quite pleasant as I didn’t have to deal with competitions of getting company reps’ attentions. 
Companies I’ve talked to are: Microsoft, Telus, Silicon Knights, Thales, Evertz, and Softchoice. Latter two companies aren’t really in my area of interests, but the end products and services they do sound quite interesting. Anyway, despite my boldness, 
I wasn’t able to grab numbers. By numbers, I mean starting salary figures.
Most companies or should I say, all companies loosely use the term, ‘competitive wage.’ What does that really mean? Nothing, at least to me, nothing at all. Perhaps they are being defensive and try to keep their management style hidden from outside. Well it is business, and business means money. They probably want to pay as low as possible, but at the same time fish out as much talents as possible.
If I ever have to, I’ll try to extend some thoughts with further details later on, but for now, I’ll summarize some of my thoughts mainly in point forms.
First of all, good things about Career Fair today in general,
- was held in the newly built building, David Braley Athletic Centre so everything was laid out in a very clean manner
- list of companies participaing at the fair and associated maps to indicate their booths/tables were quite nice as well
- in general wherever it’s held, Career Fair itself is quite useful in terms of meeting reps from numerous companies
Now the downside of today’s fair,
- I really don’t know in what ways they decide to put companies. They weren’t sectioned clearly. It might have been much nicer if companies from similar fields are grouped together so that students would have better chances of meeting more people and perhaps get to know some companies students weren’t aware of initially.
- the schedule in my opinion makes it worse. Though fair was held for 5 hours (which indeed is long enough), but it was only sufficient to those who do not have straight classes. For example, most if not all, students from Software Engineering have straight classes from 11:30 to 4:30. This makes most of us very hard to attend the fair, if not impossible.
- sadly, there weren’t that many software companies participating the fair. I was kind of hoping to see more companies from IT fields, and perhaps looked forward to seeing RIM coming over as well. Too bad the fair couldn’t attract more companies.
Moving on to the impressions I’ve had upon meeting reps from each companies I dropped by, I’ll talk in the order of: Microsoft, Telus, Silicon Knights, Thales, Evertz, and Softchoice.
First off, Microsoft (US) seems to be quite active about collecting students’ resumes. Good thing I printed out handful copies of resumes before I came in. Some of the good points were:
- they, at least the person I’ve talked to, were quite keen on asking various questions about students’ experiences, skills and etc. Perhaps they were trying to gather students with talents as early as possible; not that I was the one.
- I had a pleasant talk with her as she didn’t hesitate to answer most of my questions AS MUCH AS possible.
- Microsoft in general is quite well known to pay good money to employees and what they do is just humongous as they cover, quite literally, a lot of areas: hardware, software, services and etc.
What I found awkward were:
- because MS is too big, 3~4 reps cannot possibly cover every single areas in an extensive manner. They could still show me the overview and general practices MS does, but it was very hard for me to ask area/field specific questions. Or maybe I was just too busy trying to meet my schedule and didn’t have enough time to ask questions.
- simply put, I just wish I had more time/chances to ask many other questions I had. I really wonder about hardware divisions like Zune or Xbox, but never had chances to ask about those.
Well, Telus… I tried to be nice to them or him specifically since he had nothing to do with the bad customer experience I’ve had with them. Telus was the only wireless company came to the fair. I wonder why neither Rogers nor Bell decided to come at all. I don’t have much to talk about Telus. The discussion with the rep wasn’t too impressive either anyway. Over the year of co-op experience at RIM, I knew what wireless companies were really onto: if I had choices, Telus wouldn’t be one of my top choices, but rather would have gone with RIM.
Now… Silicon Knights. I should admit I loved talking to them. It might have been because they were Video game company, or maybe because the discussions were pretty interesting. The lead programmer I talked was very enthuasistic about explaing what they do. I’ve left them my resume; though I lack skills and experience with C++ programming, but well I just felt like I had to give them my resume. I really appreciate the discussions I’ve had.
Some of the good points were:
- video game industry. What more do I need to say? By itself, it’s already interesting.
Making the games, playing the games and selling the games you’ve made. It’s one of those ‘dreams come true.’
- dynamic. Stable jobs are good, but I would never want to have a dull job where all you do is repetitive tasks and nothing much new. Video game industry on the other hand is known to be very dynamic and competitive. I like challenges and working for video game company might satisfy me quite a lot.
- Though not market dominant, they are making games for XBOX360, which I liked quite a lot. Wish I didn’t have to sell the console. Oh well.
- Free T-shirt! Too bad it was large size tho.
Some down sides were:
- poor schedule. Yes, this was not their fault, but too bad most software engineering (& game design) students had to miss the opportunites due to conflicting schedules. In general, its table/booth should have attracted quite numerous students, but well.
- a bit of poor presentation. Mind you, the poster they set it up was actually great. The sword on a black background looked pretty cool (and this definitely caught my eyes). However, they would have sold themselves much better by emphasizing the fact that they are ‘video game’ producers. Something about emphasizing some words like dynamic, thrill, excitement and etc might have helped if they have chosen to put such words around their booth/table.
- Mints… they are so so. But they were given free so I won’t complain much.
I can probably go on and on, but it will make this note too lengthy. I’ll try to post rest of thoughts as time permits later on.
Hyomini 1:16 pm on March 13, 2009 Permalink
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