The OLINformer

Hello everyone!

I am your guest blogger for the day! Let me introduce myself, my name is Emma Goodman. I am an Assistant Director of Admission and an alumna of Olin, Class of 2006 (the first graduating class, whoo hoo!). I am currently pursuing a career in acting in Boston, and the Admission gig is my day job so I can eat, have a roof, get benefits, and so I can give back to the school that gave me so much while I was there.

Enough about me. Recently, Oliners had a day off from classes - not just for some holiday. It was a day which we call Career Initiatives Day, where students learn more about different career paths, how to find a job or apply to grad school, how to use some of the resources we have on campus, which major they should choose, and have a chance to talk to visiting employers in our Career Fair where we had 25 companies come to campus to recruit from our student body of 304. That’s 12.16 students per company! (although I wouldn’t want to a student divided into .16’s)

The day was a huge success, and I think the students liked having the day to pursue their internships and jobs without having the stresses of class.

Here are some pictures from the day to show you a little more what it was like:

This is the obligatory picture of myself at Career Initiatives Day. Now you know who I am, and I get my picture on the website. Oh yaaaaaah. I helped out Leslie Larocca, Director of Post Graduate Planning, and her team in PGP with catering for the event. We had cappuccinos available in the morning for students, staff and faculty.

Between sessions and before the Career Fair started, everyone got together with their advising families (students and their faculty advisors) and had bag lunches from the cafeteria. Corporate guests were invited to join families for lunch as well. It was a beautiful day, and I must say, doesn’t Ben ’07 in the bottom right corner look content?

Speaking of Ben, here he is with Christine Kelly, Assistant to the President. Christine gave a well-attended talk about networking for students earlier in the morning.

Now on the Career Fair. I was not the only Olin alumni at the event that afternoon. Not only was there an alumni panel for current students to ask questions from, but two of our corporate guests were alumni! Here is Mikell “Miks” Taylor, Class of ‘06, with a colleague and two students - Christie ’07 and Meena ’08. Miks was there representing Bluefin Robotics and had some large robots for some of the students to play with.

Bluefin wasn’t the only company with items to attract engineering students. The representative from Case New Holland watches as Madge ’07 looks over some examples from the company.

Here are Andrew ‘09 and Matt ‘09 with the representative from DRS Technologies. Don’t they look happy? I always liked Career Initiatives Day because it was a day where you could see everyone dressed up in their duds to impress their future employers.

Here’s Joe ‘09 with the representatives from Bose. Companies try to give away lots of free things at career fairs to attract students to their company as well as use cool gizmos, and Bose was not an exception! You can also see how companies can go “all-out” by seeing the large display from the company behind Bose.

Overall, it was a good day. I hope you liked my little intrusion here in Allison’s Blog. Maybe I’ll be a guest blogger again at some point in the future.

-Emma