The eight Ivy League colleges and universities plus MIT and Stanford have collaborated on a week-long, online event whereby students and employers can meet each other in cyberspace.
The Ivy-Plus Virtual Career Fair, coordinated by Brown University, begins at 12:01am on April 12 and runs through 11:59pm on April 18. Graduating seniors and graduate students as well as recent alumni/ae from MIT, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Yale, Brown and Stanford can meet and interact with employers in fields including advertising, public relations, publishing, sports management, media, entertainment, government, education, nonprofit organizations and the environment.
The participating schools have targeted employers who normally do not recruit on their campus, as well as employers in which students have expressed an interest and a small group of "PhD-friendly employers."
Through the web site, which uses technology developed by Crimson Solutions, recruiters can communicate with prospective employees on line, visit chat rooms, schedule interviews on line, perform full-text searches on r�sum�s that have been posted to the site, and view r�sum�s in their original formatting.
The Virtual Career Fair also acts as a database, allowing employers to find the right graduates for their needs, and allowing students to easily identify employers in preferred career fields and locations.
"Employers are using the web in an effective way to communicate to students not only the opportunities that are available, but also present current information on what the employer is all about," noted Marianne Wisheart, associate director of Career Services and Preprofessional Advising. "In collaboration with other top universities, we will offer students a group of targeted employers in which we know our graduates are interested, but who are generally not accessible through the traditional means of recruiting."
A version of this article appeared in the April 7, 1999 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 43, Number 25).
