Yordanos Gardner and Monica Maravilla walked into the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education’s job fair with a good idea of their career plans and a bit of trepidation.
“We’re seniors, and it’s terrifying to go into the next phase,” says Gardner, a native of Belvidere. “Do I want to go grad school? Do I not? What would I want to do in grad school?”
But conversations with one of the nearly 50 employers packing the Anderson Hall gymnasium Feb. 21 might have changed and eased the minds of the Kinesiology majors.
“I want to go into physical therapy, but being here also opened the thought of cardiac rehab,” says Maravilla, who is from Carpentersville. “You already have a thought in your head, but when someone professional asks you why you want to go into that, it just makes you actually think about it and have a different mindset. It’s like a whole switch that goes off in your head.”
Gardner shares that assessment.
“With kinesiology, you can do many different aspects, and being here really helped me to see what I want to do. I want to do cardiac rehab or strength and conditioning now,” she says. “I love working with people, and so going into hospitals, I would like to work in that environment. I also want to open up my own gym for the personal training/strength-and-conditioning side.”
The job fair – the department’s first – attracted about 260 students wanting to make professional connections that could lead to jobs or internships.
Employers included hospitals, YMCAs, minor league sports teams, physical therapy clinics, fitness centers and park districts as well as NIU Huskies athletics and the outdoor educators of NIU’s Lorado Taft Field Campus.
Middle: Rachel Kowal and David Serowka.
Bottom: Vicky Books and Brandon Male.
During the afternoon, students could pose for free LinkedIn portraits.
“Our department wanted to find a way to more efficiently engage our students with our industry contacts and to leverage those long-standing relationships that we’ve cultivated over the years,” KNPE Chair Steve Howell says.
“NIU’s job fair is an outstanding event,” Howell adds, “and we wanted to supplement that experience with more of a program-specific opportunity for students to network with professionals specific to their own home disciplines.”
Faculty and staff who raised their hands and rolled up their sleeves included Vicky Books, Shaine Henert, Rachel Kowal, Brandon Male and David Serowka.
Kowal, a KNPE instructor and co-organizer of the event, is pleased with the results.
“It showed the students that there are many paths they can walk and that they have the knowledge to go into any of them. Being able to talk to people in multiple different pathways from our degrees probably gave them a better insight of what they want could do with their own degrees after school,” Kowal says.
“What made me feel like it was a success for both sides was that students were coming out really happy,” she adds, “and that the organizations were coming out and thanking us for inviting them and wanting to be invited back if we did it again.”
Count Edgar Metaj, a senior Sport Management major from Glenview, among the happy.
“I am graduating soon, so it’s good to know what’s out there,” Metaj says. “I loosely know what I want to do after graduation, but it’s good to have more opportunities than what you have your eyes on and also to get to know more people in the industry and have more connections like that.”
Metaj enjoyed learning about internship opportunities in the NIU/Chicago region that allow “for bouncing around to different departments and finding what your pathway is and what you need.”
He does expect, however, that his career will focus on sport marketing, communications, social media and publications. “I’m working currently in NIU Huskies Athletics Communications as a student intern, which has been really fun for me,” he says, “and a really good experience.”
Gardner and Maravilla also rated the job fair as “really cool.”
“Just having one in the place where I’m studying – having the opportunity to walk down a couple of stairs and a going down the hall and finding 50 tables full of people offering jobs, offering internships, offering different positions, is really door-opening,” Maravilla says. “It gives you better opportunities because it’s right in the place where you’re at.”
Serowka, an instructor in Sport Management, opened many of those doors.
“Those relationships have been built over time with all of us in our program,” Serowka says.
“With more than half of these folks, I sent a quick text message in November or December, giving them a heads-up that we were going to be pulling off an event soon, and it was just pretty much, ‘We’ll be there. Whatever you need,’ ” he adds. “It wasn’t like we had to go out hunting for people to bring them in.”
He was pleased by the presence of so many minor league sport organizations, including the Chicago Steel, the Chicago Wolves, the Kane County Cougars, the Rockford Rivets, the Schaumburg Boomers and even the Chicago Union, an ultimate Frisbee team.
“It was great because when students first come into our program, they set the bar extremely high, where everyone thinks they’re going to be a president in the NFL or they’re going to be a general manager in Major League Baseball, or something like that, and those are good goals to have,” Serowka says. “But the reality is there’s only a handful of people who can actually do that.”
Yet the local operations offer a good launching pad, he says, “and definitely need the help.”
“We often say that you can wear many different hats, and I often try to steer students that way or at least explain to them that it’s not a bad thing to go to work for one of these small teams, and they don’t realize it until they actually do it and see how much fun it is,” he says.
“When you can start to put those pieces together – when you can work for a smaller team and have some bigger responsibilities at a smaller organization – that obviously will then transfer over to carrying those responsibilities into maybe a bigger club,” he adds.
“And there are even some folks who do branch off and go to the majors and, sometimes, they come back because they don’t like how big the organization is. They might have one specific task compared to being in a smaller place where they can get their hands in a lot of areas, which is exciting, fun and different from the day-to-day.”
Doug Czurylo, senior director of Finance and Administration for the Kane County Cougars and a two-time graduate of NIU, liked what he saw.
“The Career Day was a very positive one for the Cougars,” says Czurylo, who currently teaches Sport Finance at NIU. “We were able to speak with over 100 students throughout the day and hand out information on a number of different opportunities we had open. The wide variety of students and disciplines attending gave us a great set of applications and resumes for our staff! We loved the enthusiasm, character and aptitude of the students who stopped by.”
Henert, associate professor and program director for Kinesiology, also tapped into his network “to leverage the partnerships and connections that we have.”
“I invited OSF; our representative from OSF, Tim Bauscher, is actually an NIU alum, and he was more than happy to come down. He’s an exercise physiologist I’ve worked with for years. One of the reps from UW Health used to work with me at Rock Valley,” Henert says.
“I was really happy to see that we had some clinical sites for our kinesiology students to help broaden their horizons,” he adds. “I thought it was also cool to see some of our alumni representing the organizations, either as employees or internship students.”
For those employers who expressed hope to Kowal for invitations to return next time, Howell has good news.
KNPE is likely stage the job fair “around this time every fall and every spring” as organizations begin their seasonally timed hiring, he says.
“We have the blueprint for it and are confident in our ability to deliver it, so, ‘Let’s go for it,’ ” Howell says. “Now that students have seen it once, we should see a lot of repeat customers, and hope that they would share that with their classmates and friends at the university.”
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