The All Ivy Environmental & Sustainable Development Career Fair has earned itself a reputation in the sustainability industry as being the premier place to recruit talented students from the Ivy League universities. For 14 years the fair has brought together students and alums from Columbia University, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania and Yale, to meet with recruiters from top organizations. This year, the fair attracted 80 employers—many of them attending for the first time—from across the public, private and nonprofit sectors.
Students were excited to see some new names adding diversity to the list of organizations at the fair this year, including the Rockefeller Foundation, World Bank and PepsiCo. “I noticed a big improvement in terms of the diversity of employers present at the fair this year. Overall, I feel that students had more choices to explore”, said Fred Yonghabi, an alum from Columbia’s MS in Sustainability Management program.
The fair is useful for students preparing to enter the job market in May who are looking for full-time positions, and also for those who are seeking to gain insight more broadly into the types of positions available to them. Caroline Juang from Harvard said she was glad she had made the trip down from Cambridge: “This was a great opportunity to connect with companies directly, ask questions, and get feedback on what positions are best suited for me based on my experience.”
From the employer’s perspective, once they see the caliber of students and organizations at the fair, it becomes an event they look forward to attending year after year. “It doesn’t get much better than the All-Ivy Environmental Career Fair for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency” remarked James Feeley, HR Specialist at U.S. EPA-Region 2. Students, too, return for a second time, often as recruiters: “I’ve come full circle: as a student at the fair in 2016, to attending the fair as an employer looking for candidates for the next hiring round at Carbon Lighthouse” said Tim Whalen, Sales Development Representative with Carbon Lighthouse.
For more information, please contact Natalie Unwin-Kuruneri (natalie@ei.columbia.edu).
You can watch video interviews with participants at this year’s fair on Facebook, here.
