Two-day Employer Breakfast provides students and recruiters with great food and valuable networking

By Caroline Osterman

This winter, the UC Berkeley Master of Engineering (MEng) program was proud to partner with the School of Information to host an Employer Breakfast. Current MEng and I-School students along with visiting company representatives — several of them MEng alumni — gathered in the Tilden Room on January 30 and 31, 2019 before the multi-day UC Berkeley STEM Career Fair. Of the two mornings, over 186 people attended the event, including 100 current MEng students and 54 employers, who represented 34 different companies.

Many of the visiting companies represented exciting new technologies that campus recruiters were eager to share about with students. On Day 1 of the event, University Recruiter Samer Shehab shared Ancestry’s values as well as the vast engineering and data analytics opportunities for students in Bioengineering, Industrial Engineering & Operations Research, Mechanical Engineering, and more. With over 20 billion records of family history, Ancestry leads the industry in connecting millions of people to their roots. Willy Pell, Talent Acquisition Recruiter at Blue River Technology, spent the second morning explaining to students the promising future of farming technology, and Blue River’s mission to build the next generation of smart agriculture equipment using computer vision and artificial intelligence.

“The Employer Breakfast is one of my favorite recruiting events of the year,” says Julie McShane, Fung Institute Director of Career Development. “I enjoyed seeing so many MEng alumni and project partners recruiting at the event. It is great to host employers in a more casual atmosphere where students have time to really learn about their companies and the projects they are working on.”

“It is great to host employers in a more casual atmosphere where students have time to really learn about their companies and the projects they are working on.”

Several industry representatives of these companies were also alumni of the Master of Engineering program. Three of these alumni — Vikram Singh, Scott Perkins, and Kevin Feng, who all graduated in 2018 with an MEng degree in IEOR — are also advisors for Capstone projects for the 2018–19 year. The MEng teams they advise are, respectively: Building Algorithms to Help People with Diabetes, Optimizing the Manufacturing Process of Aligned Composites, and Machine Learning to Discover Criminal Activities in Financial Transactions. “Over the last year, we significantly increased the number of alumni-advised capstone projects,” says Alex Beliaev, Director of the Capstone Experience. “MEng alumni can take full advantage of the unique features of the Berkeley MEng capstone program. They can recruit the best students during the Capstone Marketplace, then can form an interdisciplinary team and work with students across the College of Engineering. They work closely with the Career Development team to participate in a variety of MEng events during the year.”

The 2019 Employer Breakfast was a resounding success, and 100+ Berkeley grad students walked away with valuable networking connections. As the spring semester continues, MEng students will have access to various additional career events and workshops, including the Fung Institute’s many Career Development services and resources. Be sure to follow along as we continue to document the success of our soon-to-be MEng graduates! Connect with the UC Berkeley Master of Engineering program on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

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Berkeley MEng students get jump-start in spring recruitment was originally published in Berkeley Master of Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.