Over 100 employers recruit SVSU students at spring job fair

April 14, 2008 —

College students from around the area, including SVSU, Delta, and Northwood, filed through O'Neil Arena in hopes of landing a job or internship with one of the 109 companies present at the University-wide employment fair held last Friday.

Employers ran the gamut from banks and technological companies to restaurants and schools searching for tellers, programmers, waiters, and teachers.

"Saginaw Valley has a great pool of applicants who have the things we're looking for in future employees," Mary Carrey of Chase Bank said.

While some places were just looking for students to work part-time, other companies were searching out students for fully-fledged careers and internships for career preparation.

"Our company is looking for both students ready to graduate and begin a career and those who want to do an internship," said Cheryl Burmeister of BlueWare, a company that works with electronic health records filing. "We hope those who intern here might become full-time employees eventually." Some companies, such as the Bavarian Inn Restaurant in Frankenmuth, pride themselves on working with students and their school schedules.

"We're very interested in supporting our employees who are students," Rhea Bartels of the Bavarian Inn Restaurant said. "We even have a scholarship that we award to 10 of our employees and we try to work with schedules as much as possible."

One company was looking to benefit from SVSU's large number of students in the education program. The International Academy of Saginaw, a newly opened school, was recruiting teachers.

"We think that this is a great employment fair to come to because of SVSU's strong teacher training programs," said Trina Mushatt, the school's business manager.

Many of the employers agreed that this year's fair was successful on their end and that they had numerous strong candidates.

"We actually hired one person already today," Bartels said. "We have several interviews lined up for next week as well."

Students said that the fair was beneficial.

"I now have at least four or five places that I could potentially intern with," freshman Lindsey Zion said. "I think that this was a great opportunity to network."