On Thursday September 21st Augustana held Pro Fair, had over 50 companies in attendance, and invited students from both Augustana and St. Ambrose to come participate.
According to Lisa Slater, the Office Coordinator of CORE, Pro Fair has been around for many years and started with St. Ambrose and Augustana getting together and wanting to create better opportunities for both of their students. Lisa said,  “We like to seek out employers that would be great with our students, within our majors we try to have a wide variety of different people. Diverse just like we are.” There isn’t a criteria for choosing a company for Pro Fair. Augustana sends invites to those they like and also have a number of companies that inquire to be a part of Pro Fair as well.
This is a great opportunity for all students from different majors to come to one place to find their first potential jobs. The gym was filled with students in their best attire, resume’s in hand, going to the select tables that they were interested in to hopefully decide on their beginning career paths. Jason Mathew, senior at Augustana said, “It gives me practice with different employers and internships, it makes it easier to talk to a representative in person rather than sending in a resume.” Many students felt the same way and said that being able to get in front of employers face to face feels much better.
When it came to possible improvements students might like to see there wasn’t much that came to mind besides air conditioning. Courtney Becker, Senior Business major at Augustana, said, “maybe putting companies into groups of specialties and making the map a little clearer would help.” However, she also said that this would be hard to do since some companies do multiple things that multiple majors could work with.
For many students this was not their first Pro Fair. Many have gotten internships from attending in years past and still come back to either find a new internship or obtain a job for after college. Pro fair is a strong tool that many students use to find jobs however, this isn’t the only method Augustana uses. Many students will go to Core, talk to their advisor or possibly a professor in their field to set up jobs or internships if they didn’t find what they were looking for at pro fair. While Augustana may have many options at it’s pro fair, students will always have a plethora of options when it comes to finding what they want to do.