International students, don't you just hate career fairs?

By Yameng Zhang

This is the season of career fairs. All those great companies come and students stand in line waiting to talk to those representatives. Everyone dresses up and hold their leather folders, ready to pitch about the greatness of themselves. I walked across campus, I saw those ambitious young adults striving for their future, which anomaly made me sweat.

As an international student myself, there are obstacles that stand in my way of job seeking. Language, identity, visa, the fear of not getting a job as well as the fear of getting one, they all came up and are prepared to take me down. Imagine you are the HR director of a big company, with all those newly graduate students striving for career opportunities in your company. You don’t need to deal with their visa status, consider about their language fluency, not even mention the culture differences for domestic students; compare to the international students, they need H1B visa to be employed in the US, they have linguistic barrier and acculturation issues, which group of students would you prefer to hire?

The answer is almost obvious. Therefore, for those international students, why even bother to dress up and bear the nerves and talk to those HR representatives about the subtle possibility of choosing them instead of the American students? I know I have my reasons.

It is not an easy decision to make when I determined to leave my family for 4 years, it is also not an easy thing to ace in classes taught in another language, and it is definitely not easy to stand beside English speakers to brag about my competency to compete with them. However, I made it so far and I won’t let all the efforts end up in vain. That’s why I have to have the nuts to go to career fairs.

I have to prove to everyone that I have what it takes to work as competitive as American students. I have to show that I worth more than the cost of hiring an international student, so that I can be chose over the other American students. Confidence comes from the efforts we have put to ace in classes, comes from the fact I came over all barriers, comes from the affluent, professional experiences and the evidences prove that I am graduating with nothing inferior than the others.

This is what it takes to be an international student in the job market. Be confident for all the qualities you have, be brave to confront with the domestic competitors, be strong to attend the next career fair even after you are rejected for your identity, be the one that never gives up on yourself because only you know what it takes to be an international student.