USC Career Fair

I volunteered to help out today at Broadcom's booth at the USC Career Fair. Lis (recent USC undergrad) and I carpooled from Irvine and got to our table at 10am where we saw Wendy, our HR college relations person, setting up. What followed were hundreds of students coming up to our table and asking us about internships and full-time jobs. During the first hour, all three of us would be talking to different students and taking resumes at the same time and still have lots of people in line. It's a tough job... I was really tired at the end of the 4 1/2 hours.

We were supposed to be recruiting for accounting and finance today but 95% of the people we talked to were graduate EE or CS students. Is USC still giving these degrees away?* Also, about 2/3 of the engineering students we talked to were from India and all needed H1 visas. We quickly learned to tell the difference between graduate engineering students and pretty much everyone else. Of course, it was much easier for me having been one of them before.

Some of these students were very persistent. There was one guy who was a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in control systems. I told him I was pretty sure we did not have many opportunities that fit his background but he insisted I take his 5-page resume. Another person wanted me to set up interviews for him for a finance position despite having no finance experience or education.


Our "booth" from the back. We didn't set up our backdrop since the two companies on either side of us hogged all the space.


Hundreds of companies...


"Anybody looking for a finance job?"

I didn't get a picture but I talked to a guy wearing a Ming Hsieh T-shirt. Ming is Haley's cousin who donated $35M to USC and only got the EE department named after him; the engineer school is named after Andrew Viterbi. Henry Samuely Samueli got his name on the engineering schools at UCLA for $30M and UCI for $20.

* I got my MSEE degree at USC too: 9 classes, no thesis or dissertation, no final project :)