Friday, October 10, 2014YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- While job and internship fairs are one of the best ways to meet student prospects, there are other benefits, as Rick Yohman, an electric design engineer at Altronic, discovered Thursday at his first internship fair at Youngstown State University.
“I've enjoyed talking to the other vendors here. It's almost like a local networking [opportunity]. You get to talk to people that you don't normally get to see,” he said. “We want to take part in the community. That's really what brings us here.”
For the first time, the YSU College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics held its own internship and co-op fair — the fair had been a joint venture between STEM and the Williamson College of Business Administration — and the changes were noticeable.
The number of companies at the fair more than doubled from last year as 43 local, national and international companies filled the Chestnut Room in Kilcawley Center.
With students lining up early to get inside, Stephen Rodabaugh, associate dean of the STEM college, cited the advantages both students and employers have filling internships and co-op programs.
“Co-ops and internships are perhaps the best pathways in the applied sciences to career placement. In an internship or co-op, a student gets to test drive the company and the occupation while the company gets to test drive the students,” he said. “We find that this leads to good career placement further down the road.”
According to Jessica Duffey, human resources director for Laird Technologies, the company has enjoyed success with YSU students in providing internships and filling full-time positions.
“We are in the Warren area with one of our major business units. It's a great program and a great location,” she said. “We've gotten students for YSU in the past. In fact, the person here with me is a Youngstown alum. The reaction, historically, has been very good.”
Yohman said Altronic has had similar success.
“We're a local company. We're only 10 minutes away. A lot of our employees and design engineers are YSU graduates,” he said.
Rodabaugh added that the STEM college requirements for student internships are among the most stringent in the region, putting better students face-to-face with prospective companies.
“All students with our main internship and co-op courses have to have at least a 3.0 [grade point average] in their program and a 2.75 overall. What we're doing is branding the College of STEM with our best students,” he explained.
Students at the fair, for the most part, didn’t feel confined to one field within STEM. Instead they went from table to table, talking to all employers, who ranged from the Ohio Department of Transportation to Vallourec to University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Some students, however, had a different method of choosing which companies to talk to.
“Whichever people look the friendliest, I go up and talk to, chat them up,” Anthony Rohan, a sophomore biomechanical engineering major, said laughing.
Rohan said he talked to Delphi and several of the medical companies at the fair, with some success.
“[At one booth,] we talked for probably 20 minutes about hip sockets -- which was very interesting -- that [the host] had designed, doing all the designing through software. I was really interested in that,” he said.
Even as a sophomore, with two years before he graduates, Rohan knew the advantages of getting an internship, even beyond the experience having one can bring.
“Any experience [you have] makes any job so much easier. It just makes you more confident. Plus you know more and when you get out and learn outside the curriculum, it can add to your confidence,” he explained.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
CLICK HERE to subscribe to our free daily email headlines and to our twice-monthly print edition.