The Engineering Career Center staff includes director Vita Como, Gerald Davenport, James Simpson, Restella Roberts and Leslie Coward.

Engineering students, and the employers who hire them, have a new resource to help them achieve their goals: a recently launched Engineering Career Center that provides job leads and many other resources.

The Engineering Career Center team is dedicated to helping students find pre-professional jobs that relate to their studies and have the promise of opening doors for them after they graduate. Helping students get those jobs is the core mission of the new center, which was launched last March as part of the dean’s initiative to offer undergraduate students more services and better facilities.

The center helps current students investigate job choices in engineering; identify their skills and interests; and develop a plan to achieve their employment goals.

	“My Co-op at Flowserve has further developed my interpersonal skills by giving me the opportunity to work with others in the company, and negotiate with customers everyday. I have also become more organized through working on multiple projects on a weekly basis.” —Frank Serafini, mechanical engineering senior interning at Flowserve Pump Division

“Our students work, and our goal is for them to have the best job possible, says Vita Como, director of the center.”

“We help students find jobs in engineering,” Como says. “We are not career counselors. Students who want to take a Myers-Briggs, or want to identify their personal strengths and weaknesses, are referred to experts across campus. We do those things that help students polish their skills, particularly the skills that will help them get jobs.

The career center staff also works closely with companies and engineering firms to meet their hiring goals and is putting effort and resources into identifying new corporate partners.

The center team has an ongoing program to systematically identify “new to the college” employers that have the kind of jobs engineering students might want.

“We can offer companies a full menu of ways to interact with our students, and that’s really one of the blessings to have at the center. We can talk about internships, ISIP, Co-op and permanent placement,” Como says.

Staff in the center is available to take appointments during regular office hours from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and ongoing workshops are scheduled throughout the semester.

The type of employment opportunities available to students varies widely, and sometimes the greatest service the center can provide is helping students identify what they don’t want to do.

“We’ve tried to convince students that part of the luxury of having an internship is that very often you might take a job and discover more about the kind of job you really want. That insight can be extremely important,” Como says.

Although a relative newcomer to the college, the center is already having an impact. From March to December 2004, the center distributed 2,366 resumes to 72 companies. In addition, the center already has had approximately 1,500 student visits.

	“I just started as a full-time employee at Kellogg Brown and Root, but I interned with KBR for two and a half years before graduating. I know the company fairly well, and I built a lot of good relationships during my internship. Electrical engineering is very broad, so everything that you learn in class will not be directly applicable to work, but I saw a couple of things at work maybe a year before I would have seen them in the classroom.” — Wes Gryder (2004 BSEE), who joined KBR after interning through the college’s Industrial Scholar Interns Program.

The center is an umbrella organization for two services already offered at the college: Cooperative Education, which is directed by Gerald Davenport, and the Industrial Intern Scholars Program, which is led by Leslie Coward.

Cooperative Education (Co-op) is a program that enables college students to receive career training with pay as they work with professionals in their major fields of study. Work experience in government, business, industry and human services enhances a student’s academic training. This valuable experience is documented on a student’s official transcript.

The Industrial Scholar Interns Program (ISIP) is a highly selective program that provides the opportunity for undergraduate engineering students to obtain scholarship funding plus earn extra money and valuable work experience. The program helps students finance their education, provides important work experience, assists companies in meeting professional recruiting needs and provides an expanded, diverse engineering work force to the Houston area.

Recent changes in the way ISIP operates will create even greater opportunities for students. Beginning in August, every scholarship recipient in the Cullen College of Engineering is a potential ISIP participant.

The center’s focus on providing workshops in interviewing skills, dressing for success, professional and business etiquette, and job search techniques, to name a few, has provided students with a chance to polish their style as well as their resumes.

“I’ve done a workshop on how to have a successful business meal,” says Como, who served for many years as the college’s director of development before tackling the challenge of leading the new center. “It’s really about being comfortable and selfassured. After the workshop, students know what to do with their napkin when dinner is over. We had a discussion in one session about how to signal a waiter that you’re finished with your meal. You put your knife and fork, tines down, on the plate. Little things like that are about being polished and you know what? It makes the difference.”

“I enjoy sharing this—a picture of a kitten looking at its reflection in the mirror and seeing a lion,” says Como. “Philosophically, that’s where we’re coming from—helping students to know they are going to be excellent employees, that each has something very special to offer—they are unique and valuable.”

For more information about the center, visit www.egr.uh.edu/career.