ESSU Meeting Minutes & Active Memberships
ESSU Career Fair Workshop Featuring Accenture - 02/17/2016
February 17, 2016
This meeting started at 6:00 p.m. in SCB 3001. During this meeting, ESSU was joined by professionals from Accenture who work at the Battle Creek location. The presentation theme was about perfecting our elevator speech and it was the last career fair workshop until the actual Winter Career Fair.
All four Accenture professionals present at the meeting work for the Accenture Federal Services which is a subsidiary of Accenture that focuses on helping U.S federal agencies. Kerri Allen, an application manager at Accenture Federal Services, was joined by three Grand Valley alumni who have all graduated within the last several years: Kyle Shillito, Kyle Bigelow, and Alex Stutzky. After introductions, all three of them talked about strategies on how to make the perfect marketing pitch out of an elevator speech and the type of content we should include in it. The most important part that students should include in each of their 30 second to one minute elevator speech is to relate how you and your skills fits in a particular company’s big picture and highlight your objectives. Kyle and Alex did some role playing on a typical interaction between a student and a recruiter at a career fair where Kyle gave a good example of his elevator speech. Next they had everyone go into small groups to practice and rehearse their elevator speech. Finally they asked the students to break out of their groups and asked for volunteers to give their speech in front of everyone in the room. This was a more hands-on and interactive meeting because the format allowed feedback and ideas from fellow members and the Accenture professionals. Hopefully everyone at the meeting got some extra tips on how to polish their elevator speech which should lead to success at next week’s Career Fair. The meeting adjourned at 6:45 p.m.