Jack Abbot- General Reporter
The Office of Career and Professional Development hosted a fair for students in health to meet with employers in their field for employment and internship opportunities.
“It’s important for students to be able to connect with different industries and different people within professional settings so that they can make connections themselves that lead to other opportunities,” Assistant Director of the Office of Career and Professional Development Rachel Cunningham-Exavier said.
Several organizations from across the nation visited the school on Thursday to offer opportunities to students. The event was held in the Adanti Student Center Ballroom where these organizations had tables set up with resources and handouts.
“We get to be able to broadcast our brand within Trinity Health as a nationwide Catholic hospital system,” Talent Acquisition Partner of Trinity Health Jennifer Leonard said.
Trinity Health came to provide information on career opportunities from within their hospitals, both in terms of administration and health care. There were several other hospitals, as well as career opportunities in health research.
“We are really looking to widen our search in terms of getting talented employees as new staff,” Yale’s Associate Director for Clinical Trial Operations for the Cancer Center Clinical Trials Office Kira Pavlik said. “We really love to partner with Southern because it’s a great opportunity for us to support a local university while also getting great talent.”
Pavlik is an alumnus from Southern. She also represented one of many different organizations from Yale to attend this event.
“Today, we’re offering an internship for someone to come to Yale University School of Medicine and do a one-year internship through our department” Senior Manager of Pathology in the Yale School of Medicine Cindy Deriso said.
Many organizations have expressed that working with the university has been a good experience for recruiting in the past.
“We’ve had several nursing internships with them,” Talent Acquisition Partner for Nuvance Health Joshua Gaffrey said.
The event had a good turnout. Many students expressed that the event was helpful for networking and learning about different career opportunities in the public health sector.
“Today’s event is about networking with recruiters and employers from different healthcare organizations that students are looking to work with” healthcare studies major Ahzanay Mccall, a senior, said. “I got to network with a few companies that I was planning to work with since I was a kid.”
The university has held career fairs in the past; however, this event is a new system that the Office of Career and Professional Development has been working with. Rather than having one singular career fair, they are instead hosting fairs for specific concentrations, which allows for more representatives to attend and more specialized help for students.
“It’s a field that not a lot of people know about, so we wanted to give public awareness to what’s out there,” Deriso said. “This is my first time here, so we’re hoping it will be successful.”
