The Part-time Job Fest was held last Wednesday, Aug. 30 in the Warren Ballrooms put together by Plattsburgh’s State’s very own Career Development Center Director Julia Overton-Healy.
Overton-Healy has organized this event for decades now and strives to help all students find some kind of work on or off campus. Many students of different ages were present at the opening of the event in hopes to finding a part-time job and was welcomed with open arms.
There were many employers at this event with goodie bags, business cards and jobs that they could not wait to give away, such as employer and PSUC alumni Kevin Bradard, who manages a food business called Crossmark in the Champlain Centre, who said that this was his very first time promoting his business at PSUC.
“I know it’s pretty competitive to find a job so close to campus,” Bradard said, “so I’m here to give students a chance to make some money.”
Bradard was only one of many employers who was ready to hire PSUC students immediately, ranging from working in Clinton Dining Hall to a cashier for Whiteface Mountain. First year students were also given the opportunity to sit at a table and learn the fundamentals of Cardinal Connect, the website for Plattsburgh students to search and apply for local job listings around campus.
There were a variety of jobs on the website, such as an Educational Opportunity Program Student Office Assistant and a Field House Equipment Manager.
Prior to the part-time job fest starting, there was a line right outside the ballroom doors, with eager PSUC students looking for work, including PSUC freshman, Dequan Walker. However, Dequan was not there for the same reason as many others because he had a different objective.
“I just wanted to come here and find myself,” Walker said.
“I had thought the only job I could get here would be in the dining hall, but it turns out there are so many to choose from.”
Most students attended this event to acquire “pocket money” but Walker was looking for a possible profession.
Overton-Healy weighed in with her thoughts about the part-time job fair and Cardinal Connect.
“It’s really focused on helping students identify part-time employment while they’re here at school on campus and off campus,” Overton-Healy said. “We know that a lot of students need part-time jobs to pay bills, or just to have walking around money.”
Overton-Healy said that her goal was to help students find jobs on and off campus that could help prepare them for their inevitable future as an adult in the real world.
“It’s also good for students to have jobs because it helps them build skills with time management, priority management, learning what employers are going to expect when they graduate, building a work ethic, building your network on campus with the jobs too,” she said, “so our objective primarily was to help students find work, and we know that the part-time job fest was the easiest way to do that.”
About three years ago, Cardinal Connect was introduced so that students could be updated on job listings 24/7 by logging in to their student portal.
“We started that three years ago, so the part-time job fest then turned into learning how to use Cardinal Connect to find those jobs in the system.”
Healy has great confidence in Cardinal Connect and insisted that anyone can understand it if the proper time is taken with the program.
“I would say that our upper-level students have gotten used to it now because they’ve had it since they’ve been here. First-year students need to go spend some time with it,” Healy said. “It’s pretty intuitive. You go in and there are certain tabs…It’s not something that you just want to walk into and think immediately you are going to understand it”
Overton-Healy is confident in the part-time job fest and said that once a student obtains a job, they can keep it as long as they work hard every year.
“Many students need to realize once you get a job on campus you can keep going back to that job as long as you do a good job,” she said.
Overton-Healy will continue to organize this event every year with the goal of every student having the job they may need
“I think it’s a success, if I didn’t think it was worth our time, we wouldn’t be doing it”.
Email Mataeo Smith at news@cardinalpointsonline.com
