By Mary J. Demarco, Student Media
In 2005, Mason undergraduate student Hilton Pereira entered the Mason career fair with his eyes set on adding experiences to his resume through internships and volunteer opportunities. What he didn’t expect was to change both his major and career path after signing up to volunteer at a local fire department during that career fair.
“This job fair made a huge impact on my career choice. I was going one way and then found the fire department and fell in love with it,” Pereira said.
Twenty years later, Pereira now returns to the job fair not as a student but as a mentor along with his colleagues at the Prince William County Fire and Rescue. From February 18 to 20, 2025, he, along with 191 other companies, congregated in the lower level of the Johnson Center to meet with students in hopes of recruiting new interns and employees.
This event didn’t happen overnight. It took three years of planning and coordination to make the three-day career fair work. 
Matt Myers, Associate Director for Employer and Alumni Engagement at Mason Career Services, explains that each day of the three-day event is designated towards a specific field.
“I gathered some ideas from them [other universities] and that's how we came to STEM day, [a] business, government, and nonprofit day, and then our all majors day where it could… be a good fit for everybody involved,” Myers said.
Along with a team of staff from Career Services, Mary Claire Kraft, Career Services Senior Manager in charge of employment and alumni engagement, has spent the past 3 years working on preparing the 2025 Mason Career Fair. Kraft emphasizes the influence student feedback has in planning future events.
“This year, our switch to a three-day fair was in response to student feedback. We wanted to have a more spread out environment, a place that students could navigate with a little more comfort,” Kraft said.
Current Mason sophomore Zachary Grim attended all three days with an open mindset to working for any company that offered a position. 
“My parents told me when searching for jobs and internships to cast a wide net,” Grim said. “I'm just looking at all sorts of stuff. Obviously stuff like writing and communications, internships because that's where I really want to focus on. But also stuff like Afax, Fairfax County Parks, maybe even the police department and global internships because I want to study [and] work abroad.”
In “casting a wide net,” Grim talked to just about every booth in the room. Most notably he found the Trader Joe's booth and Global Internship booth to be the most informative and helpful in his search for a job. During a conversation with an employee at Trader Joe's, Grim recalled that the employee went out of her way to provide information on the specific store location and contact information.
Meanwhile, Freshmen Alison Crane and Rachel Lay navigated their first career fair, initially feeling overwhelmed. However, as they acclimated to the environment, they found the career fair to be very enriching.
“Every single stand I've looked at, somebody's talked to me pretty soon. It was quite nice actually,” Crane said.
Crane and Lay’s anxieties over the situation were quelled by the supportive job fair participants. It’s people like Pereira who made the difference.
“I just like to have conversations with students from different majors, from different career paths, from different ideas of what they want to do, but really just give people the opportunity to open up their minds and look at different opportunities that they would not otherwise have thought about,” Pereira said.