Career Fair Information for Students

Exploring Your Options

Exploring what you want to do for a career can be exciting, frustrating, surprising, tedious, enlightening, frightening and satisfying - sometimes all at the same time! The world is changing rapidly, and technology is often on the forefront of these changes. As a student in the College of Technology, this means that your career options will most likely be in a fast changing and exciting field. But it is only exciting if YOU find it to be exciting, and that can be the challenge of mapping out your career. You need to know yourself and your likes and dislikes well enough to determine what fields interest you and what fields do not. And it is important to know how well these career goals fit in with your overall life goals. It might all seem a bit overwhelming at times, but since the directions that technology will follow is often difficult to predict, the best that anyone can do is make an informed and thoughtful decision.

As for being informed about career options, there is a plethora of options available to you, especially with the advent of the internet. You can consult our web resources page for some of the best web sites that we have found. Please also feel free to talk with one of our helpful student advisors concerning your exploration of options in the College of Technology.

Work Experience

Part of the dilemma in starting out in a career is the old adage "You can't get a job until you get experience and you can't get experience until you get a job". As a result, it is often advantageous to be open to experiences that may not exactly what you had pictured for yourself but that may lead to greater knowledge and experience about yourself and about the field that you are interested in.

Some of the activities that you might consider to help create these positive experiences could be the following.

• Volunteer at a non-profit or charitable organization in a way that can use the technical or social skills that you want to build
• Join one of the numerous student organizations within the college or the university. You can meet other students and employers who share your common interests and have a lot of fun in the process.
• So some self-study. Utilize the vast resources available to you from the UH libraries, the internet and the city of Houston. Some of our favorite internet resources are available on our web resources page.