Career Fair, but I Forgot to Turn Off Auto-Loot

LeTourneau is famous for its extraordinary employment rate. Supposedly you can come here and have nearly a 100 percent chance of finding a suitable job. Whether reality is quite as miraculous as the stories I have heard, today’s Career Fair certainly opened my eyes. Most companies came looking for interns for summer 2026. According to my roommate, their selections are generally settled before next spring, while next semester’s fair will already be preparing for the year after that.

After attending Church Fair, for finding churches, and STOMP, for finding student organizations, I have gradually understood the formula behind these events. They are anime conventions where you walk around collecting freebies! As someone with absolutely no convention experience—yes, I never managed to attend one before leaving China, though I no longer particularly regret it—I understand perfectly that shamelessness is king. I accepted my roommate’s advice to dress formally and was fortunate enough to borrow his spare shirt and tie.

Auto-loot: on!

I dragged Kris, another Chinese freshman, along, and the two of us confidently charged in.

There were plenty of booths and a broad selection of employers. America always has infrastructure projects in progress, so I seem to remember talking to quite a few companies recruiting civil-engineering talent. As an aviation-maintenance student, Kris also encountered many jobs requiring his field’s expertise. This is LETU, famous for aviation, after all. As for me, a double major in mechatronics and cybersecurity apparently makes me the brick that can be carried wherever a brick is needed. No one was recruiting specifically for that combination, but whenever I asked, I seemed to qualify anyway. One internship related to mobile-app development caught my attention. I wonder whether I could find time to explore it alongside my online summer classes.

Once the conversation ended with “Thanks for the introduction,” we reached the “Hey, can I eat this—cross that out—can I take this?” phase. The moment we received permission, we grabbed the item and fled. Thus the weight of each person’s bag grew in direct proportion to the number of booths visited. When we counted the haul at the end, my roommate was the MVP!

Damn it. He arrived before I did, and some of the things he collected were already gone by the time I reached those booths.

My greatest lesson from a full day of conversations is that I should make a résumé of my own. (Wait, did someone not already remind me to do that?) Rather than writing nonsense like “participated in breaking a Guinness World Record,” I should seriously consider which experiences from my life employers might value in particular. After all, excessive packaging is never the worst strategy.

Now that matters have reached this point, I might as well play some Legends of the Three Kingdoms.