Career expo: From uniform to uniform

The career expo was held Feb. 16 at Claflin. (Panther photo by Jeturi Brown)

With resume in hand, senior Jeturi Brown, headed to the 2017 CHEC Career Expo in the Tullis Area on the Claflin University campus on Feb. 16.

As Brown entered the building, he instantly recognized that half of the gym floor was filled with vendors for education and from police departments.

“Most of the gym held vendors for education and law enforcement majors. There was probably only one table that could have been categorized for communication students, but I still learned some pretty interesting things today,” Brown said.

“I loved how they had multiple police departments from different cities coming together, however I wish there would have been more vendors for my particular major,” Brown said.

Although law enforcement hadn’t been of interest to Brown, he talked to vendors.

The event featured 29 vendors, including eight from law enforcement and 13 from education. Brown made his way first to the Greensboro Police Department, where Officer Watkins and her partner Officer Stevenson explained their expectations for the Career Fair.

“We hope to recruit some students interested in law enforcement and talk to students who may not have even thought about being a police officer before,” Watkins said. “We want them to also get interested.”

Both officers explained that being on the police force is not an easy job and requirements must be met to become a law enforcer.

“When recruiting we look for their communication skills. Not so much of how strong they are but how they communicate with people. Do they have problem-solving skills? Things of that sort,” Watkins said.

“And the passion to do the job, it helps a whole lot as well,” Stevenson said.

After speaking with a few officers, Brown made his way to another table of uniforms.

The U.S. Marine Corps had three officers, Captain Brain Deiters, Sargent Denell Rivers and Private Thristan Fuoton who spoke to Brown about future career plans involving going into the force.

“We’re here to find young students that are interested in joining the military as officers or just looking into seeing what the military has to offer for careers,” Deiters said.

“Leadership, physical fitness, and just solid character, those are the top three things that we’re initially going to look for in our candidates. However, the students who are not interested in the military are still important,” Deiters said. “Sometimes you don’t know you’re good at something until you look into it. Like people say, ‘I may not be interested in being a Marine, but I’m interested in being a photographer.

“Well, guess what, we have, we have photographers in the Marine Corps. So we want to talk to everybody to get that information out there. People think military and think combat or war, but in all actuality, we have all these other things. We have supply check management, we have logistics and we have administrators. We have a lot of different occupational fields that can help any student out, but we just need to stop and talk to them and let them know they exist.”