Last year 1,840 seniors and graduate students registered for campus recruiting.

Accountancy majors, biology majors, computer science majors… right on down the academic alphabet to visual and performing arts majors. If NIU had zoology majors, we probably would have had some of them, too.

Most of these 1,840 students registered early in the fall ’92 semester. They went to an hour-long orientation session and they got a campus recruiting calendar, and they learned how to request interviews and how to sign up for interviews and where to go for interviews, and they were all excited about looking for a job, and then 775 of them just gave up.

Didn’t “give up,” exactly because they never really started. It’s not like most of them couldn’t have scheduled interviews, either. Many of the 775 had the same majors as student who did plenty of interviews.

Some of the 1,065 participating students got jobs as a direct result of their campus interviews—in fact, many of them did. The others developed and improved their interviewing skills—a clear advantage in their post-graduation job search. The 775 non-participants didn’t get one ounce of good out of it.

There are lots of reasons for non-participation in campus recruiting, some of them perfectly good ones. But one big reason seems to be that students have a lot of anxiety about their job search. They put off creating a resume because it seems to be a too-difficult task.

But the dictionary offers two definitions for anxiety. The first is “eager” and the other is “distressed.” Last year’s students characterize this distinction well: 1,605 of them got eager and 775 of them got distressed … too distressed to take advantage of a free, effective, easy-to-use process that could have helped them find a good job.

Every year between 300 and 400 employers spend a lot of time and money to come to Northern and schedule 6,000 to 8,000 interviews. Who are these companies and why are so many students getting job offers?

Soon you will graduate and the opportunity to use campus recruiting will be gone. You may think you’re too busy to work campus recruiting into your busy schedule, but imagine how much time you’re going to have after you graduate and don’t have a job or a clue about how to get one.

If campus recruiting doesn’t offer the type of job you’re looking for, remember that CPPC isn’t just campus recruiting. The center has job information for every area, including visual and performing arts, education, health and human services, media, the sciences, and technical fields. There are also counselors to help you write your resume, identify appropriate employers, or get your job search off the ground.

The first campus interviewing orientation is scheduled for Monday, Aug. 30. Starting August 26, the center will begin its series of workshops on resume writing and interviewing techniques, job search tools essential for all graduates, regardless of their majors.

Stop by 210 Swen Parson soon. Pick up a workshop schedule. In the next few weeks there are 11 resume-writing workshops and seven interviewing techniques to choose from. Go to one of the first three of the seven campus interview orientations and you may win a $25 Holmes Student Center gift certificate.