November 28th. It's here. It was an early start for most of us, we had some final things to set-up, print the pamphlets, run through the keynote and introduction. The morning was chaotic as there were a lot of behind the scenes tasks that had to be completed to ensure the career fair would run coherently. My morning started off by printing pamphlets in the english office, welcoming the speakers and schools, going through the brief opening remarks with Mariana and a few other things. Soon all the schools and most of the speakers had arrived, we commenced the Career Fair. It was quite a memorable moment because about 7 months of planning and ideas that had been on paper had finally come to life. We only had 5 TGO members present on the day, and so everyone was kept quite busy. It was a great help to have Nibwene and Alishah there to aid the TGO members with some logistical stuff.
The schedule below shows the different events that took place in the Career Fair. We had a brief moment when we wanted to change the schedule and have group A, B and C as there were a significant amount of students, however we ended up sticking to the old schedule to avoid confusion.
On the day of the Career Fair, we were hoping to have some way to capture the attendees thoughts and opinions on how and what we can improve on. To cater for this, Ms. V suggested we have a reflection board (pictured below) where the girls can post their expectations and then their thoughts on how the experience can be enhanced.
From my conversations with girls that attended the Career Fair, I learned that there was a slight discrepancy on what they expected and what the Career Fair actually was. Nonetheless, they expressed that they were extremely happy and learnt a lot in the two and a half hours. There we two workshops-microfinance and self defense- each one led by IST students. There was also time for the students to talk to various different women who were professionals in their respective fields. The careers represented were; architect, auditor, financial consultant, professional football players (the captain of the National Tanzania Football team attended), journalist and scientist. The students had about 40 minutes to move around the different career booths and ask the professionals questions. However, because of the small space in the library and the large amount of people it didn't entirely function properly as some students were unable to listen to the conversations/ask questions. In addition, the students said that they would like more time, in order to go around all the booths and get all their questions answered- something to improve next time. We spontaneously decided that we were going to have another session where the girls could ask the speakers more questions. This would take place before the closing remarks. The set-up was different as all the students and speakers were on the upper level of the library, therefore making it more of a Q and A panel.
All in all, I think the Career Fair was a great success, a lot more successful that I thought it was going be. Everyone in TGO played a significant part in making sure it went as well as it did, starting from the phenomenal keynote speech to setting up a power point with the contact details of all the speakers. It was a great day, for everyone that was a part of the Career Fair-well at least I'd like to hope it was.
The schedule below shows the different events that took place in the Career Fair. We had a brief moment when we wanted to change the schedule and have group A, B and C as there were a significant amount of students, however we ended up sticking to the old schedule to avoid confusion.
On the day of the Career Fair, we were hoping to have some way to capture the attendees thoughts and opinions on how and what we can improve on. To cater for this, Ms. V suggested we have a reflection board (pictured below) where the girls can post their expectations and then their thoughts on how the experience can be enhanced.
From my conversations with girls that attended the Career Fair, I learned that there was a slight discrepancy on what they expected and what the Career Fair actually was. Nonetheless, they expressed that they were extremely happy and learnt a lot in the two and a half hours. There we two workshops-microfinance and self defense- each one led by IST students. There was also time for the students to talk to various different women who were professionals in their respective fields. The careers represented were; architect, auditor, financial consultant, professional football players (the captain of the National Tanzania Football team attended), journalist and scientist. The students had about 40 minutes to move around the different career booths and ask the professionals questions. However, because of the small space in the library and the large amount of people it didn't entirely function properly as some students were unable to listen to the conversations/ask questions. In addition, the students said that they would like more time, in order to go around all the booths and get all their questions answered- something to improve next time. We spontaneously decided that we were going to have another session where the girls could ask the speakers more questions. This would take place before the closing remarks. The set-up was different as all the students and speakers were on the upper level of the library, therefore making it more of a Q and A panel.
All in all, I think the Career Fair was a great success, a lot more successful that I thought it was going be. Everyone in TGO played a significant part in making sure it went as well as it did, starting from the phenomenal keynote speech to setting up a power point with the contact details of all the speakers. It was a great day, for everyone that was a part of the Career Fair-well at least I'd like to hope it was.