Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

For the third week in a row a collection of booths dots the campus’ façade. This time it’s the Job Expo. For five days, different companies who count the school highly among its pool of resources send over their HR personnel to hand over application forms to students who are interested in becoming part of their company.

It used to be free. Well, it’s still free for the faculty to go in the cordoned-off grounds, but students have to pay five pesos a day if they want to inquire with any of the companies showing up. The only exceptions are the students who are taking up their career orientation class. As far as I know, they can get in for free because it seems tacky to require them to enter the expo then ask them to pay extra for it even though they already enrolled in that class.

But the rest of the students are charged an entrance fee. And if the companies they want only show up on two different days, that means they have to pay the entrance fee both times. I don’t know if they still get a discount for buying the entrance tickets for the whole week.

I guess the Office of Career Services has to defray some of the overhead they spend making the booths professional looking enough to pass for those trade fairs in the convention centers. At least they have a better venue now, the lobby of the new administration building, instead of the open basketball courts where the company representatives were surrounded by puddles of rainwater during the monsoon season, and exposed to the wind.

It’s gotten very organized to the point where students interested are told beforehand what the companies would require: resumes in the accepted format, copies of their transcript, and SSS number. There is even a booth for the SSS to facilitate people who want to get a number with them.

What surprises me is that the alternative to the SSS number (according to the expo brochure that I read) is an employment record. Now, probably only a relative handful of graduating students here have held summer jobs, internships, practicum or O.J.T.s. For some companies, that does not even count as previous employment. Does that mean the Job Expo is geared not only towards the graduating students but also to the alumni and the part-time teachers and other employees of the university looking for better work?

On another note, I forgot to mention last week that my special class major student in computer methods asked me for his next programming assignment. I asked him whether I should give him one- or two-dimensional arrays already, and, predictably, he chose one-dimensional arrays. It was a slightly complicated task, and I gave him two weeks to accomplish it.