Utica University hosts many events every year and one of the top attended events this year was the Job & Internship Career Expo organized by the Center for Career Readiness team. Around 80 employers participated and over 175 students attended on March 4, giving them the chance to engage and ask questions.

The Center for Career Readiness is a small team – only six people planned and organized, five students and the center’s director. Each person filled a certain role and was instrumental in orchestrating the large-scale event. 

“I was helping out with checking students in at the start of the event then I mainly came as a student,” said Peyton Boyce, data analyst at the Career Center. “I helped people check in, I made sure everyone was doing okay and setting up alright and if any students needed help, I talked to them and directed them to where they needed to be.”

While some of the center’s staff helped check-in  students, others had more hands-on involvement behind the scenes.

“I was active in cold-calling employers to ask them to register, follow-up calls about payments and any other details and monitoring the career development email for all of their questions,” said Analise Burdo, a Graduate Assistant at the center. “I had a big communication role, but I also aggressively marketed to students through small promotional events and mass messaging.”

Burdo created small promotional events for the Career Expo outside of the dining hall, giving out flyers and small parting gifts to let students know this is a great opportunity. Despite the event’s success, the small team faced challenges organizing a large-scale expo.

“The most stressful part of the event was planning it before hand, just trying to figure out all the logistics and what employers were coming and how we were recruiting the employers,” said John Durkin, a Graduate Assistant of the center. “As well as just making sure everyone showed on the day of and was satisfied with how everything went.”

Durkin said he was happy with the results despite some of the struggles with planning.

Carly Bonaventura, director of the Center for Career Readiness, never had a blueprint to follow from the previous Career Expo’s. She started with a blank canvas and created everything from scratch.

“I relied on the skills that I had when I came into this role, which were networking,

connections, who I knew, and building relationships with employers so we can start bringing them in,” Bonaventura said. “We started to market everywhere.”

Since Bonaventura was the only professional staff member, she faced some challenges throughout planning the event.

“The standards that I have for myself are high, and that was one stress but we pulled it off as a team but then I am a team of one professional staff so when you are that, you have to be the back of the house but also the front of the house operation, so when I was the face of the operation, I was also thinking about the back of things, how it is running and how everyone is feeling, ” she said. “That was hard, but we did a really good job honestly.”

Many Utica University students asked questions about next year’s event and the team  already started to get a head start of planning for the 2027 Career Expo.

“When I think about next year, we did send out some feedback surveys, we got some great responses,” Bonaventura said. “Theres some things we might change like timing, length of the event, we might look at making this a two-day build up of speakers, rather than the day of.”

She emphasized the importance of maintaining the event’s atmosphere.

“I don’t want to lose the feel that we had this year,” Bonaventura said. “The hospitality, the food, the way people felt needs to be replicated.”

Bonaventura expressed gratitude toward the team as a whole and everything they have been through and accomplished.

“I will stand by this till the day I die, our center, while it services the whole university, has me and students and we really did an incredible job and it is student led,” she said. “It is an opportunity for you guys to elevate, grow, and meet people that is incredible for your career.”