By Isabella Bratton ('26)
Houghton’s Grad School Fair for the Fall 2023 semester was on Wednesday, Oct. 25 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Van Dyk Lounge.
The Grad School Fair gives all students the opportunity to speak to representatives from different graduate programs.
Senior Kayleigh Verspoor (‘24), who is considering online grad school for a master’s in education, attended the fair and saw a good variety of schools represented.
Verspoor said, “There were options for programs exclusively online, exclusively in person and hybrid programs. Additionally there were programs available for a wide variety of content areas such as education, the health care fields, counseling and many others.”
Senior Abigail Pixley (‘24) found last year’s Grad School Fair helpful in deciding what schools she wanted to apply for. Last week she was able to speak to the different representatives from the schools she applied to, and got an even better sense of what the schools are like.
Senior Lillian Turner (‘25) said that she was already thinking about staying at Houghton to get her MBA, but going to the Grad School Fair helped solidify that decision and made her more confident that she was choosing the right option.
Turner also appreciated that some of the representatives she met spoke from personal experience, since many are currently, or had been in, the program they were representing.
Verspoor commented that it would be helpful in the future for Grad School Fairs to categorize the schools in a list or organize the tables based on the programs.
“For example,” Verspoor explained, “there were a lot of schools representing healthcare programs exclusively which are irrelevant to me, but I didn’t know that until I walked by their booth and talked to the representative.”
One small criticism that was fairly common among students was the time the Grad School Fair took place.
“The timing of [the Grad School Fair] was right in the middle of classes,” Turner said, “everyone has classes around lunchtime. And it was throughout the entire lunch block, so people who wanted to go probably wouldn’t be able to make it. I could barely make it as a worker. I think maybe having it after classes would be more helpful.
Verspoor said, “Sometimes in attending events such as these we become more aware of opportunities we didn’t even know existed and it broadens our minds to think of new and diverse possibilities for the future.”
Pixley had the same mindset, expressing how beneficial it can be for students to get their name into the graduate school system.
All three recommend for students to attend future Grad School Fairs, even if they aren’t planning to go onto graduate school. ★