Career Fair Fun

For the last two days, I attended the Georgia Tech Career Fair. Almost 300 employers were on hand and thousands of students crowded the basketball courts in the CRC to get face time with the various employers.

Being an engineering and tech school, it was no wonder that most of the companies present were there hiring aerospace engineers, industrial engineers, computer science people, etc. But I did find a few companies looking for EAS grads. Here is a listing of companies with which I spoke:

• NASA Goddard Space Flight Center - I worked as an intern at Goddard back in 2001 and so I know that they have positions in climate and climate change. Whether or not they are hiring is another story.
• Los Alamos National Laboratory - This lab is mainly focused on remote sensing and cloud physics, but one of my friends told me about an alleged opening for a climate dynamicist there as a postdoc. The guy with whom I spoke seemed interested in my credentials.
• Naval Academy Research Laboratory - Working for the Navy may not be on the top of my list, but nonetheless they are looking for meteorologists, climate folks, and oceanographers so the CV is in there.
• General Electric - The shocker for me. I saw the big booth and decided to stand in the medium-length line and talk with them. I saw a talk at Tech on GE moving toward wind energy and so I thought that they might be in need of modelers or climate people to help them with that venture. Indeed, when I got up to speak with the representative, he was quite impressed with my resume and also enjoyed the break from speaking with all the EEs and IEs at the fair. He told me that indeed they were looking to hire some modelers and also there was a chance that they were looking at hiring climatologists.
• Trinity Consulting - As some of you might know, I have been considering non-traditional job routes for climate scientists, and climate consulting is a growing area, especially with the current threat of global warming looming in the political and public discourse arena. A former EAS Ph.D. grad currently works for them, and so I stopped by to give my resume. The gentleman seemed impressed though he wasn't too thrilled I was still a year away from graduating. Oh well - it is what it is.

So overall, I think that the Career Fair was a good learning experience for me. It gave me a chance to talk with some interesting folks and also to get together a resume and CV. Granted, I still have to revise both of these, but this was a learning experience, and that is what I intended it to be. Nothing will be perfect.