Employers ranging from Enterprise Rent-a-Car to the FBI were recruiting students Wednesday in the Alumni Memorial Union at the Career Services Center's annual Career Fair.

According to Laura Kestner, director of the Career Services Center, 139 employers registered for the event seeking students looking for internships and jobs after graduation.

"We invite 3,000 employers," Kestner said. "And our invite list is very diverse in terms of field and major."

Many of the participating businesses accept a variety of majors when looking for prospective employees. Enterprise Rent-a-Car — the largest employer of recent college graduates in the United States — is one such company.

"We see a lot of business and communications (majors), but we really consider a lot of majors," said Nicole Achter, the recruiting manager for Enterprise in Wisconsin. "It's a lot about leadership and getting into mid-level management. Just being able to build a rapport with people is important."

Still, some students were disappointed with the diversity of employers at the event, as the majority of companies in attendance came mostly from the engineering and business fields.

"I personally have only three places I want to check out," said Casey Herfel, a senior social welfare and justice major in the College of Arts & Sciences who was looking for more education-oriented companies. "I'm limited in my ability to pass around my resume."

Kestner said certain disciplines don't value career fairs as much as others and have different recruiting styles.

"We always get criticized by students who say their fields aren't represented," Kestner said. "The reason that business and engineering are always there is that those are fields that have college campus recruiting programs."

Kestner said communications companies and non-profit organizations lack these full-time recruiters.

"Those are the types that don't hire at the volume the others do," she said. "It's not worth their time to spend a whole day at a career fair."

This made it difficult for criminology major Anette Divjak, a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences, to find possible employers.

"A lot of agencies I'm looking at are non-profit," Divjak said. "They don't have the money to send out recruiters. They have to rely more on the Web to recruit people."

Students in the communication field encounter the same problem.

"They don't recruit that way and it's a competitive market," Kestner said. "Students are competing for positions rather than companies competing for students. You don't have to spend $200 to go to a career fair when you have people knocking down your doors for jobs."

Engineering, on the other hand, is an area currently competing for students. According to Sue Michaelson, the director of the College of Engineering co-op program, more than 55 of the companies in attendance were from the engineering field.

"I would have to admit that most of the jobs here are pretty technical, which is good from our perspective," Michaelson said. "The last two years have been rather slow because the economy was slow. Now we're definitely sensing the job market picking up."

Michaelson felt that overall, the career fair was a success.

"If we've gotten the students and employers together, we've accomplished what we needed to accomplish," she said.

Students in other, lower-represented fields were less enthusiastic.

"I feel that if we have the majors here on campus, everyone should have the ability to go to a career fair," Herfel said. "Their fields should be represented so everyone is able to network that way."

This article was published in The Marquette Tribune on September 29, 2005.