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Buckeye Job Fair (plan for life after football)

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Buckskin86

Buckskin86

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Buckeyes are witnesses to the future
Football program's job fair draws 57 companies and about 150 student-athlete job-seekers
June 21, 2013

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COLUMBUS, Ohio - All of the players on the Ohio State football team, and dozens more student-athletes from across the school's 36-sport Department of Athletics, took part in a first-ever student-athlete job fair at Ohio Stadium that drew senior staff and human resource representatives from 57 businesses and organizations and Ohio Governor John Kasich.

The job fair, an idea of coach Urban Meyer and organized by administrators in the football program, was an opportunity for Buckeye student-athletes to prepare now and to experience today the protocols, experiences, tools and preparation needed to secure a good job when their athletic playing days are over.

"This was real life and this was great," junior Joel Hale said while standing in the middle of three rooms full of business leaders from every industry and business sector, including manufacturing, medical, pharmaceutical, public safety and health, homeland security, retail, food, insurance, banking and finance, broadcasting, consulting and apparel.

"I have ideas now about how I want to prepare myself, and I've got a list of key contacts that I will email a `thank you' to tomorrow and possibly reconnect with once I graduate."

Appreciation by the student-athletes for the opportunity to experience such an event was ubiquitous.

"This is really an important event for us," senior Marcus Hall said. "This really shows how much Coach Meyer and this football staff care about us and our life and careers after football."

"It was really proactive," Hale continued. "This job fair helps ease us into what a real job search is going to be like."

Nationally known entities like Nike, ESPN, IMG, The Limited Co., Kroger Corporation, Cardinal Health, Net Jets, Wal-Mart and State Farm Insurance were part of a heavyweight lineup that also included the Cincinnati FBI, Columbus Zoo, Buffalo Wild Wings, Bob Evans, WBNS-TV, the Big Ten Network and many more local, regional and national companies.

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http://www.ohiostatebuckeyes.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/062113aaa.html
 
Buckeyes plan for life after football
Program helps players connect with employers

osufb-6-23-art-gh2nfh6g-1osufb-6-23-fs-1.jpg

Fred Squillante | DISPATCH photos
The NFL?s Troy Vincent addresses Ohio State players on Thursday. From left: Joel Hale, Tracy Sprinkle, Jeff Heuerman, Michael Hill, Chris Carter, Steve Miller, Noah Spence and Adolphus Washington.

By Bill Rabinowitz
The Columbus Dispatch? Sunday June 23, 2013

They came to Ohio Stadium on Thursday wearing suits and ties instead of jerseys and helmets. They carried r?sum?s and briefcases, not footballs.

In the same stadium where Buckeyes football players seek victories and glory on fall Saturdays, they came hoping to make connections and impressions that will help them when their football careers end, whether it?s after their senior season or after an NFL career.

Under coach Urban Meyer, players must show a greater degree of commitment to the game. The same goes for life after football. He has established a program called Real Life Wednesdays to help them prepare for their post-playing career.

Business leaders such as Limited Brands CEO and chairman Les Wexner have spoken to the team. So have former players such as Mike Doss, Jeff Logan and Dee Miller. Thursday was the culmination of the program. Fifty-seven companies set up shop in the Huntington Club at the stadium for a job fair specifically for Ohio State athletes, beginning with the football team.

?What are you going to do when all the cheering stops and you stop being an Ohio State football player?? said safety Christian Bryant, who will be a senior in the fall. ?This is the time to network with companies and businesses to get our names and faces out there and to give them our r?sum?s.?

Meyer started a scaled-down version of the program late in his tenure at Florida. The idea started days after the Gators won their second national championship in January 2009.

?We were sitting around the staff room,? Meyer said, ?and one of my coaches said, ?You know what, Coach: We work so hard to get these guys degrees. When we were young, a degree meant a job. Those days are over. A degree doesn?t mean a job. So what can we do for these players?? That?s when I started thinking, and that?s when I came up with this.?

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http://buckeyextra.dispatch.com/con...23/buckeyes-plan-for-life-after-football.html
 
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Job Fair = Simply Outstanding

Just simply outstanding. Most of these athletes won't get TO the 'show' less have a long career there, and if it is a 'non-paying' type of athlete, then these little tidbits are quite good career enhancers.

tOSU alums/boosters have had a reputation over the years of 'taking care' of the athletes (mostly football, and I'm certain that tOSU was not the only college doing this), after their eligibility and all was exhausted. I hope this is still true, and the other outstanding program is the one Tress (?) started by bringing back the young men (some not so young now) and giving them tuition to finish up their degrees that someway, somehow were never finished in their five year eligibility period.

Commendations to Urban and tOSU for their concern and caring for these student/athletes after their sports contributions are done with to the university. And to the boosters as well for looking out for Buckeyes.


:gobucks3::gobucks4::banger:
 
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TheStoicPaisano;2348426; said:
I'll be a stick in the mud and bitch about how exclusionary this is.

These guys play football better than the student population, I get that. Does that make them more qualified for a brand marketing gig at a nike or net jets? Not so sure.

Rant over.
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Students get dozens of job fairs to choose from over the course of the year. Football players are basically getting a power hour.

http://careers.osu.edu/faculty-staff/career-fairs/

Fair trade. In the month of Sept alone last year there were at least six job fairs available to the student body that the football players were unavailable for because they were busy kicking ass on the field.
 
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I'd submit that most of those fairs are meat markets, at least the ones I went to in 2005-6 both in Columbus and at UChicago.

The student gen pop doesn't get a face-to-face with Wexner. And it sounds like this is a once-per-week power hour.

To be more clear, I love what Meyer is doing for his charges. But there are thousands of other students who not afforded the same opportunity. Cardinal Health, WBNS, whatever, they hit all the fairs. Bringing Nike/IMG/ESPN in and hanging a proverbial 'no non-athletes allowed' sign is interesting.
 
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Dryden;2348436; said:
Students get dozens of job fairs to choose from over the course of the year. Football players are basically getting a power hour.

http://careers.osu.edu/faculty-staff/career-fairs/

Fair trade. In the month of Sept alone last year there were at least six job fairs available to the student body that the football players were unavailable for because they were busy kicking ass on the field.
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Just checked a calendar. None of those job fairs took place on a Saturday. If these guys have time (as they should) to go to class and study halls during the season, there's no reason that they couldn't have made any of these job fairs.

That being said there are plenty of other job/grad school fairs that are limited by college/major/honors status etc. At the end of the day, I guess it's up to these companies to decide if it's worth their money to recruit such a narrow segment of the university population, particularly one that is entering with average stats far lower than that of the overall freshman class and leaving with much less likelihood of having graduated than the overall senior class. My guess is that this had a lot more to do with schmoozing coaches and sniffing jocks than it did with anything else.
 
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TheStoicPaisano;2348426; said:
I'll be a stick in the mud and bitch about how exclusionary this is.

These guys play football better than the student population, I get that. Does that make them more qualified for a brand marketing gig at a nike or net jets? Not so sure.

Rant over.
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This event was also open to OSU athletes outside of football, but I don't think it's fair to suggest these student-athletes are where they are solely due to athletic ability. The football team alone maintains almost a 3.0 GPA in college courses, and in many cases these young men were good students and probably in leadership roles coming out of HS as well. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to become an elite college athlete, and those are traits can that translate well to working in the "real world". These student-athletes also have a lot of visibility due to the high profile of Buckeye sports, and so it's probably also in OSU's best interest to maximize their employment potential: IMO this is an example of the best that college sports can offer young people, investing in them on and off the field. Well done, Coaches!
 
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BayBuck;2348817; said:
This event was also open to OSU athletes outside of football, but I don't think it's fair to suggest these student-athletes are where they are solely due to athletic ability. The football team alone maintains almost a 3.0 GPA in college courses, and in many cases these young men were good students and probably in leadership roles coming out of HS as well. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to become an elite college athlete, and those are traits can that translate well to working in the "real world". These student-athletes also have a lot of visibility due to the high profile of Buckeye sports, and so it's probably also in OSU's best interest to maximize their employment potential: IMO this is an example of the best that college sports can offer young people, investing in them on and off the field. Well done, Coaches!
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Or not. Sometimes there's a happy coincidence between the two, but I fail to see any causality whatsoever when so many elite athletes have exactly zero skills off the field? In the case of those athletes who do excel off the field, I would say that it has much more to do with coming out of (in order of importance) good families, good schools and good neighborhoods than any link to their athletic lives. These same types of families, schools and neighborhoods produce countless highly successful non-athletes also.

I was very pleased with the academic progress that was made in the latter Tressel years, and I hope that trend continues under Meyer, but let's call a spade a spade. Football players are still coming in much less qualified than normal students. They're still graduating at a rate almost 20 points lower than the normal student body. And that overall 3.0 is predicated on far, far too many of them still hiding out in communications, family management and sports studies majors. And Ohio State--by many indicators--is still one of the better big time college football programs out there.

Now, if we move beyond football and men's basketball, things change dramatically. By all accounts the athletes in non-revenue sports meet or exceed the averages for the overall university. So I guess what I'm saying is that it might be glamorous for a company to have a former football player on the payroll, but odds are it's going to be a former fencer who is his boss.
 
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ORD_Buckeye;2348828; said:
Or not. Sometimes there's a happy coincidence between the two, but I fail to see any causality whatsoever when so many elite athletes have exactly zero skills off the field? In the case of those athletes who do excel off the field, I would say that it has much more to do with coming out of (in order of importance) good families, good schools and good neighborhoods than any link to their athletic lives. These same types of families, schools and neighborhoods produce countless highly successful non-athletes also.

I was very pleased with the academic progress that was made in the latter Tressel years, and I hope that trend continues under Meyer, but let's call a spade a spade. Football players are still coming in much less qualified than normal students. They're still graduating at a rate almost 20 points lower than the normal student body. And that overall 3.0 is predicated on far, far too many of them still hiding out in communications, family management and sports studies majors. And Ohio State--by many indicators--is still one of the better big time college football programs out there.

Now, if we move beyond football and men's basketball, things change dramatically. By all accounts the athletes in non-revenue sports meet or exceed the averages for the overall university. So I guess what I'm saying is that it might be glamorous for a company to have a former football player on the payroll, but odds are it's going to be a former fencer who is his boss.
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I suppose I'm less cynical about the student-athlete designation for football players than you are... ("zero skills off the field"? ouch!) Nobody is saying these guys are Wall Street material just for getting an athletic scholarship, but hard work can be harnessed for use outside of football with the proper motivation. Regardless, they are going to be some of the university's higher-profile alumni pretty soon and it's in everybody's best interest that they be as employable as possible. Hey, I graduated in English with a GPA just north of 3, but it's neither my major nor GPA that started or advanced my professional career. Compiling a resume, interviewing, networking, these are the basic skills that this event is emphasizing and which will benefit these student-athletes when football is done for them.
 
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