By Rumana Shaikh

The first Education City-wide career fair was held at the HBKU Student Center earlier this month. The fair hosted around 95 companies catering to the different majors offered in EC.

Students and recent graduates of EC universities attended the two-day fair.

“The EC career services managers thought the idea of having all of the companies under one roof and at the same time would be of great benefit to the students and the companies,” said Marie Newkirk, the career services manager at Northwestern University in Qatar.

The fair hosted businesses ranging from oil companies to media organizations, as well as hospitals and non-profit teaching organizations.

Malik Habayeb, a research assistant at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies represented this fairly new institution at the career fair. A former student at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, Habayeb said that events like this allow students to meet with potential employers regardless of their majors. “It is definitely great to be part of the community here, to meet students and employers and former colleagues as well,” he said.

Resolution Productions was one of the media companies offering opportunities at the career fair. “There are so many young and creative people here, so it’s been great. We’ve picked up a stack of CVs, [from] people interested in internships, which is fantastic for us,” said Millie Lockhart, production manager at Resolution Productions.

For some students, however, the combined career fair didn’t seem any more beneficial than the usual ones.

Muhammad Taimur Rizwan, a sophomore studying Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University Qatar (CMU-Q) said that it was hard to locate companies that offered opportunities he was interested in due to the presence of so many catering to different majors. “The career fairs in my university are much more convenient and fruitful. This was only an added complexity and confusion which individual career fairs are usually safe from,” he said.

Abdul Rafey Siddiqui, a mechanical engineering student at Texas A&M University in Qatar (TAMUQ) said he was opposed to the idea of career fairs like this one since individual campus career fairs are major-specific and therefore more beneficial to the students. “I personally felt that I had the same opportunities as I would have had if this career fair had been organized in A&M (TAMUQ), since I was only interested in the engineering and oil/gas companies,” Siddiqui said.