Editorial

Staff Editorial: Students share Career Fair concerns

By Student Voice

February 22, 2026

UWRF is a campus of opportunities. Apart from a wide variety of classes that allow for students to explore their interests in an academic manner, there are also a variety of opportunities that allow for students to expand their horizons and make connections within the business fields that they plan to go into. One of these opportunities -the Career and Internship Fair- should be one of the more successful opportunities on campus for students looking to expand their connections; a recruitment event where students can meet and speak with a variety of spokespeople and make plans for finding jobs and/or internships beyond campus. However, several students expressed concerns over the Career and Internship Fair for a varietyof reasons, feeling as if more could be done to provide for students.

In our recent survey, over half of the students reported feeling like they had no success in finding job opportunities. Out of the 78 companies that made an appearance at the Career Fair, a majority of them were businesses dealing with Agriculture with a group of banks and law enforcement fulfilling a distant second. Although it is understandable that a majority of businesses that signed up for the Career Fair would have a focus in the agricultural industry due to the various Agricultural facilities on campus, it raises the question on why students felt as if they were unsuccessful in their search.

Apart from the general lack of variety when it came to the different businesses at the Career and Involvement Fair, another issue students ran into was the general policies that came to the policies regarding the use of Artificial Intelligence. From the companies interviewed, the usage of AI within their business ranged from either minimal experimental implementation to full Large Language Modules (LLMs) being incorporated using it to make their jobs more efficient.

“AI is something that our corporate team has been trying to integrate into different processes,” said Gabe Koening of Penske, “A lot of it has to do with generating reports, tracking information on trucks, [...] eliminating the human need to do it.”

Different companies at the Career Fair also commented on the use and understanding of AI being necessary for students due to its inevitability in the business world.

“Everyone’s using AI right now,” said Jordan Brownlee of Actus Nutrition, “Like it’s going to become super popular even within the next [...] 18 months. So I think that it’s super important that people are up to date on the technological side of it.”

While UWRF is implementing courses that help teach students about the use of AI and LLMs such as Management 745 and Chemistry 361, AI technologies as a whole is still in its early stages and university classes are not meeting up to the standards that businesses are pushing. But even disregarding the policies on Artificial Intelligence, the way the Career Fair was carried out felt to many like there was a dissonance between employees and students, especially given the fact that a new technology that most students would most likely not be familiar with is being presented as a necessity or a replacement to current areas of expertise in students. Despite living in a day and age where technology and focus on technology are more apparent, there is still a large amount of students who want to do things in a more tactile way and a majority of them were taught to be more tactile with their work.

The UWRF campus is a wide and expansive campus with a variety of students with a variety of interests. And while there are apps such as Handshake and facilities like Career Services to aid students in finding job and internship opportunities, physical job fairs such as the Career and Internship Fair only happen once a semester, and the way they are presented should be acceptable to any student looking for a job.