Tuesday, September29th, 2015 |

 

campus@technew om

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Companies recruit a variety of students at Fall Career Fair

Abhinaya Iyer
TECHNEWS WRITER

Getting ajob can be one of the hardy
est and most important things to do after
studying hard for 4 or 5 years at IIT! However,
every year IIT’s Career Services department
organizes a career fair where companies from
both the public and private sectors come and
interact with students. This year, the career fair
was held on the September 24 in Herman Hall.

The hall was practically jamrpacked
with students dressed in formal professional
attire along with some professors. It officially
began at noon, but the action started earlier in

the morning when all the companies came and
set up their stalls. Students started pouring in
with resumes in their hands and hope beamr
ing in their eyes! A lot ofcompanies were pres
ent including major companies like Google
for computer science majors, Illinois Depart
ment of Transportation for civil engineers, and
many other companies for other majors.

Most students were excited but at
the same time nervous about their personal in
terviews. Although most interviews didn’t last
for more than five minutes, it was enough to
make them uneasy until it was done. The come
panies there were looking for a variety of skills

from IIT students. The Hanley, Flight & Zimr
mermann Company was looking for computer
science and mechanical engineers, resulting
in a long queue of students standing in front
of their stall. Chris’ Awesome Guacamole was
favoring food processing engineers and busir
ness majors. Michigan University had also set
up a stall encouraging undergraduate students
to join their graduate majors. Cleversafe was
looking for computer science engineers with
an experience in java programming. AECOM
was on the search for architecture and civil enr
gineers who had played around with Autocad
and Revvit before. Spraying Systems Company

was a popular company amongst chemical enr
gineers. They were in search of engineers with
a passion of trying to protect consumers but at
the same time be commercially successful. The
company was into making sprayer nozzles for
paper, steel and food industries.

The organizer behind this event was
Deborah Young in Career Services; she had
help from Shirlean Williams as well as a few
student organizations. In a nutshell, the career
fair was a grand success catering to the needs
of every major on campus helping undergradr
uate students obtain internships and graduate
ing students get jobs.

From a Simple Dream to an Incredible Reality: the Story of UNICEF at IIT

Genevieve Hummel
TECHNEWS WRITER

The student organization United Nar
tions International Children’s Emergency Fund
(UNICEF) at IIT is a relatively new group on
campus. The group can often be seen at tables
and events around campus, and can be recog
nized by their vivid blue UNICEF tee shirts.
The group received approval in March of last
semester and the two students who started it
agreed to an interview to explain more about
the purpose behind the organization. The story
behind the founding of this group, as told by
the two students who started it all, is truly in
spirational.

UNICEF President Pratik Sampat
and Vice President Mert Pekdemir met each
other for the first time approximately a year
ago at the Millennium Campus Conference
(MCC). They attended the conference as part
of Engineers Without Borders. That year UNIV
CEF had decided to partner with MCC for
the conference, so there were many UNICEF
members from various colleges in attendance.
There were also many other organizations
there, but the blue UNICEF shirts stood out
to Pekdemir and Sampat They began talking
to students from other schools who were part
of UNICEF The UNICEF clubs they talked to
shared their personal stories about what they
were doing to help and showed off their clubs’
Facebook pages. They discovered that almost
all of the major colleges around Chicago had
UNICEF organizations on campus, except for
IIT. Sampat said that this “inspired us to think
about why we don’t have this kind of chapter
on our campus, why we don’t have a UNICEF
at IITE” They thought about IIT as a campus full
of such diverse students with a unique set of
skills and they wondered why there was notyet
aUNICEF chapter on campus.

During the conference, the Presir
dent and CEO of the US Fund for UNICEF,

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Caryl M. Stern, gave a speech explaining what
UNICEF was and talking about how she got
involved. The speech was so touching, accord
ing to Sampat, that it seemed everyone in the
room was crying by the end. The speech motir
vated them so much that they decided to come
back to campus and find out why there was no
chapter at IIT and see what they could do to fix
that

It took the two of them a while to
get things going because neither of them knew
anything about starting an organization from
nothing. It took a lot of work because they had
to work with both IIT and UNICEF in order to
get the group started up properly. They decided
to split the work between them and Pekdemir
focused on IIT while Sampat focused on the
UNICEF side of things. Eventually they put tor
gether an executive board for the organization
and they took the idea to SGA for approval.
When talking about trying to get approval,
Sampat said, “I think that was one of our big
gest challenges" because SGA was reluctant
to approve another nonprofit organization on
campus. At that time, it was still just the two
of them in this organization and they had to
put together a huge presentation and answer
a lot of questions. Eventually, however, they
did manage to distinguish themselves from the
other nonprofit community service groups on
campus enough to receive approval to start an
official UNICEF chapter at IIT. The organiza
tion now boasts 45 active members, with the
email list consisting of 212 members.

The main goal of UNICEF as a
whole is to “bring the number of preventable
deaths to zero." Sampat explained what this
goal means by saying, “Every single day 17,000
children die from preventable causes like male
nutrition, lack of water, not having prop er vacr
cinations, etc. These are things that we take for
granted, things that are easily accessible to us,
but 17,000 children die every day from things
like that and UNICEF strongly believes in re

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ducing that number to zero. If these are pre
ventable, we can make this zero, this shouldn’t
be impossible. That is one ofUNICEF’s biggest
missions’I

In order to contribute to this goal,
the IIT chapter of UNICEF divided up into
three committees: education, fundraising, and
public relations. The committees work together
towards the common goal and come together
for general body meetings, but they each focus
on a different purpose within the organization.

The education committee, led by Per
kdemir, has the goal ofeducating the members
of UNICEF, as well as students all over came
pus, on the issues that are affecting children
all over the world. Most of the students at this
school were raised in a sheltered community
where there was never a concern about food
and water. Students at IIT do not know what it
means to starve or experience thirst or famine
There are children that are experiencing things
that we cannot imagine and we do not know
how they are living and what they are fighting
through. The job of the education committee
is to teach these subjects around school in an
effort to raise awareness about what is going
on around the world. Pekdemir explains that
“If we don’t know about this then we cannot
help the cause, we cannot add anything, we
cannot contribute. In order to contribute we
need to talk about these facts and what UNIV
CEF does and tell it to the school so that the
school will know about what’s going on around
us and what’s going on all around the world:
This is the goal of the education committee
because “if you know, then you will be talking
to people" and then hopefully more people will
be inspired to help make a difference.

The fundraising committee, led by
Madina Tahmas, is dedicated to raising money
to send to UNICEF on behalf of the IIT chap
ter. On Friday, September 25, for example
this committee hosted an event called “You
vs. UNICEF" that raised $132. This money,

 

as well as any other money raised this month,
will go towards supporting Syrian refugees to
help children afford things such as water and
medical needs. Each month the group focuses
on a different cause and the money raised that
month is dedicated to helping that cause.

The third committee is public rela
tions and it is led by Deniz Demir. The purpose
of this committee is to help the organization by
spreading the word about what the other two
committees are doing. The goal for this come
mittee is to increase campus awareness about
UNICEF and the various activities and events
that the group is hosting around campus.

One great project that UNICEF
wants everyone to be aware of is the tap projr
ect Donating money is definitely not the only
way to help, and this project is one great ex
ample of how anyone can easily contribute to
UNICEF The tap project is a project dedicated
to raising money for clean water. In order to
help with the cause, anyone can simply go to
“http://tap.unicefusaorg/" or Google “the tap
project by UNICEF" on their phone. This will
open up a page where, for every 15 minutes
the page is left open, one day of clean water
will go to someone who needs it This is avery
simple way to help because the page could be
open while your phone is in your pocket or
while you are in class, for example. At UNICEF
events, the members working the events typir
cally have a tap project table set up where they
all leave their phones during the event.

Anyone interested in learning more
about UNICEF at IIT can go to their Facebook
page. The best way to contact the organization
is to send a Facebook message to the page,
which will be answered within three hours.
There is also a link on the page to sign up for
the mailing list and to join one of the commitr
tees. This organization is onlyjust beginning at
IIT and they are always looking for new meme
bers and new ideas.

Photo: 17y Geneme Hummel