[Sigia-l] Lack of Opportunities for IA

[Hongming Leonard Liaw]

I just had a very unpleasant experience at a job fair and led me to wonder if
there's really any job opportunities out there for IA people despite all the
assurances we hear in the classes.

I'm a grad student at the School of Information (UT Austin) studying Information
Architecture. Recently, our school informed us that since they can't seem to
put together a job fair on their own, we have to go to other schools' job
fairs. 

So today, I went to College of Natural Sciences job fair. This college includes
bio, chem, biochem, physics, math, cs majors. I went there because I thought IA
is somewhat related to computer sciences however remotely it might be. And I
don't really have a lot of choices if I want to find a job.

At the National Instrument table, I talked to their rep their and gave him a
copy of my resume. I also told him my main interest is IA and Usability
engineering. After he learned that I do not program (JAVA or C++), he then said
"Well, you're probably in the wrong job fair." with a tone of slight as if
saying "What, are you stupid! This is a CS only fair! Why are you even here?!"
I felt so insulted but yet I had to keep on smiling just to be polite. 

Other tables were at least polite and nice when they were trying to turn me
down. 

This unpleasant experience really made me wonder if there's really any IA jobs
out there right now. Of course, all of your jobs are IA related, but is there
any job OPENINGS out there for us the new graduates, and also if there's any
job fairs for IA people? I really don't want to go to another job fair just to
be insulted by an egoistic CS-centric jerk. 
 
Leonard
-- 
H. Leonard Liaw
MSIS Candidate, May/Aug 2004
University of Texas at Austin