The first step is the Career Fair.  Most universities have career fairs; some even have one devoted to the engineering school alone.  Generally, they are found in the early months of fall, and some schools have an “internship fair” in the early winter months of the new year.

What happens is a bunch of companies come on campus to meet students, collect resumes, inform students of what their company does, and ultimately, to determine who they want to pursue for positions they have available.

These fairs are your bread and butter for making contacts and getting your information out to companies, as you will never have such a golden opportunity to personally make an impression on a recruiter from so many companies at one time.  If you plan it smartly, you can make incredible headway in just one afternoon.  Oh, and don’t worry about skipping out on class.  Most professors know when the fairs are, and expect people to skip, after all—it’s your career that’s important, not theirs!

Before coming to the fair, you also need to do significant planning about which companies you want to target, learning amount about each company so that you can use that knowledge in your brief conversations with recruiters. 

I recommend targeting a limited number of companies so that you can use your time more effectively.  Typically, the lines are rather long at some companies, so if you end up spending all your time in lines for one you are mildly interested in, you may run out of time to talk to one at the very end that you really were excited about.  Make a prioritized list of companies and stick to it, even if you have to run back and forth across the building to do so!

Go to these fairs prepared with a stack of your resumes, dressed sharply, and mentally armed to ask smart questions and learn about the companies you are interested in.  Expect to be asked questions about what you have on your resume, and also to ask questions about their company and the job opportunities they have available. 

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