Society of Hispanic Engineering Conference

Iron Range Engineering gives the students an opportunity to develop their professionalism by attending leadership conferences. Cari and Carissa recently attended a conference in Anaheim, California.

The conference was geared towards developing the Hispanic engineering community, but we still got a lot out of it. The conference ran for two days and there was a career fair the following day. We attended ten different one hour workshops as well as get some volunteer hours in helping with registration for the conference. In the workshops topics such as interviewing, resume writing, and balancing work and home life were discussed.

This conference helped us to see how many different places and things an engineer can do. Companies as different as BP and General Mills sent representatives to the conference to teach young engineers about various. One of the most informative workshops we attended was sponsored by Lockhead Martin, a weapons company, which was titled Networking 101 for college students. This was important because we went to company sponsored hospitality suits where there were recruiters available to talk to about jobs. We attended these on Thursday night and had no idea what to say. We decided after that, we needed to attend a networking workshop to be more prepared for the career fair on Saturday.

Also in preparation for the career fair, we had our resumes critiqued. The biggest thing they wanted to see on our resumes was a project description, especially if there was no engineering related work experience. The career fair was a new experience for us. We were able to meet with representatives from different companies, hand out our resumes, and get some cool “swag”.

The conference was an overall success and a great opportunity to see different things available to an engineer. We both enjoyed getting companies’ point of view on what they are looking for in their new hire engineers. We will take the things we learned at this conference, build on them, and use them throughout our careers.

By Cari and Carissa