The University of Wyoming’s Advising, Career & Exploratory Studies Center, aka ACES, hosted their first ever Career Prep Week on the week of Sept. 11th.
Throughout the week, students were given resources to prepare for the following Career Fair Week, or to apply to future job searches. Each day, a series of seminars, activities and complementary offerings, like PopCam headshots in the Union Breezeway, took place throughout campus. Along with that, there were featured speakers who spoke on the importance of “career prep”.
According to Chrissy Renfro who is the Associate Director of Career Advising Services, “the importance of offering these events is giving students the opportunity to both get general instructions and information about how resumes should look, and how to prepare for an interview.”
“We also get them one on one opportunities for consultation and kind of personalized critique, which is helpful too,” Renfro said.
Among the wide variety of workshops, Career Prep Week provided information in areas that were applicable for students looking for specific opportunities. For instance, on Tuesday, Sep. 12th, a speaker representing U.S.A Jobs, hosted a presentation on how to
create resumes specifically for federal U.S. jobs.
Andi Bauman, one of the students that attended the USA Jobs resume presentation, spoke on their experience with the presentation and the idea of Career Prep Week as a whole.
“I knew that since I’m studying the environment, a lot of those jobs will fall under Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service and a million other companies. Those are all government jobs. So, I just inherently knew this was going to be beneficial,” Bauman said.
“Especially after sitting down and seeing how detailed the federal resumes are compared to a private one, I definitely would have probably had a lacking resume if I hadn’t come to this.”
While Career Prep Week had insightful aspects for many students, most attendees mentioned how their schedules were altered to attend the events. Throughout the week, most of the events were scheduled in the morning hours, while students were most likely attending classes. Chrissy Renfro stated that the University had a series of scheduling conflicts that affected both Career Prep Week and Career Fair Week.
Many events for Career Fair Week will be scheduled in areas away from central campus. Chrissy Renfro informed that there will be shuttle services for the scheduled events outside the university’s parking garage, as well as the Anthropology Building on campus.
For those looking to attend, the Career Fairs are a great way to get your foot in the door of companies within your field of study. The dates and locations for next week’s career fairs
are as follows:
Big Job Fair: Tuesday, 10am-2pm in the UW Conference Center;
STEM Job Fair: Wednesday-Thursday, 10am-3pm in UW Conference Center;
Pharmacy Fair: Wednesday, 8am-4pm in Grand Teton Ballroom @ Hilton Garden Inn;
UW College of Business Career Fair: Thursday, 9am-3pm in College of Business Atrium.
