Ben Garbacz/Daily Mining Gazette General Motors was among one of the 350 plus employers in attendance at the Michigan Tech 2025 Fall Career Fair. GM was offering careers from multiple fields which were not all related to automobiles.

HOUGHTON — Around 4,000 students dressed up and made their way into Michigan Technological University’s Student Development Complex Tuesday to make their best impressions to more than 350 employers with over 1,000 recruiters for Tech’s Fall Career Fair. Employers filled two gymnasiums and a balcony as students explored booths searching for career or internship opportunities. The Fall Career Fair is nearly double the size of the Spring Fair and has more opportunities for internships due to the fact most students wont graduate until spring.

Michigan Tech’s survey of 2024 graduates showed 94.6 percent of found a job within six months of graduation and eaerned median early career salary of $82,400. The Career Fairs are often attributed to the career discoveries for graduates. According to the Executive Director of Career Services Cody Kangas the college’s fair is distinct due to the face Husky talent is sought out because they are industry ready.

“The students that we attract to Michigan Tech, the students that we retain at Michigan Tech, and the students that graduate and launch — they come here,” Kangas said. “They’re resilient. They learn how to communicate, they learn all of these competencies that make them incredibly well rounded, and that is a differentiator.”

Employers in attendance came from all over the country as well as locally. Some of the employers included Leidos, Ford Motor Company, Boston Scientific and Calumet Electronics. Whether students showed interest in staying in Houghton to work or perhaps even the opportunity to work abroad, the beginning of their journey was in the SDC.

General Motors was looking for students with top-tier talent according to Total Integration Engineer in Manufacturing for Global Front Wheel Drive Transmissions Jason Biehl. Biehl is a Michigan Tech alumnus, ’84, in metallurgical engineering and said he is familiar with the college’s success.

“We know that Michigan Tech has some of the greatest engineers that ever walked the planet,” he said. “The whole curriculum is set up to be a balance between a kind of a hands-on and application-based and theoretical. So you have all the knowledge in the base fundamentals, from mathematics and physics and chemistry. But what mainly comes out of Michigan Tech is the problem solving abilities, so they have the application. The problem solvers and Michigan Tech engineers are known to hit the ground running.”

Biehl said GM offers opportunities to give potential employees the chance to live and work abroad and to learn different cultures due to the company stretching the globe. He said chemical and civil engineers are all needed to run plants which he compared to small cities. Biehl said there is more to GM than just vehicles, and said roads, sewers and water utilities also go into plant work.

“They want to be a designer, they want to be in research and development and work on the newest and the latest things or they like robotics? There’s something for everybody,” Biehl said.

Boss Snowplow was looking for electrical, computer science, mechanical and manufacturing college co-ops, which provide hands on experience to students. Senior Design Electrical Engineer Gary Blank said many employees at Boss Snowplow are Michigan Tech alumni, and the company location in Iron Mountain offers close proximity to Michigan Tech.

“We get them (students) involved, right at the design and right at the meat of the prototypes so it’s kind of more educational,” Blank said. “You’re actually doing production drawings, because looking at the future you’re doing the drawing, and then that part will be out there in the supply chain for Boss Snowplow and stuff like that. It’s not like you’re doing little projects over here that are never going to make it to a production environment.”

He added Boss Snowplow is family oriented, and it can offer camaraderie and friendship building which can add fun to the job.

One of the employers from Houghton was Superior Technologies, a software development company made up entirely of Michigan Tech alumni. The company brings students to the team as interns who work throughout the school year. Operations Manager Adam Griffis said once the interns graduate they are hired if positions are open and the work becomes remote.

“We bring jobs to the area,” Griffis said. “We don’t have any clients up here so we make a connection with the rest of the country to the talent that Michigan Tech offers.”

He explained normally by the time students are done with their internships they are ready to be senior developers on their own and take on mentoring the next round of interns. Griffis said the Michigan Tech curriculum is a product the company can depend on. “What we’re really looking for when we’re talking to them is communication skills. We want students that can interact with clients that can explain and understand problems, that can problem solve and explain solutions to our clients and integrate on our clients’ teams,” he said.

Students at the fair ranged from freshmen to PhD candidates. Mechanical Engineering major Joseph Huggard from Plymouth, Michigan is a freshman looking to make further connections at the fair, but already had an internship lined up back in Plymouth. Huggard said he believes the fair gives students good insight on how to achieve jobs in the future and build on connections. While he prefers to work close to home, he is open to traveling for work.

“I’m looking to kind of just build friendships and everything like in the college itself,” he said. “I’m planning on attending this career fair and future career fairs, hopefully like locking down some nice opportunities for me in the future. If not, it’s still going to give me some great skills to find a job in the future.”

Another first-year student, electrical engineering major Anna Steenwyk from Holland, Michigan, was also looking to gain experience for the next year. She said it would be nice to find a potential internship, but experience was the most important thing. She has an interest in consumer energy such as DTE Energy and ITC Holdings.

“There’s a ton of companies in there, so I’m expecting a lot of stuff I could look at,” Steenwyk said. “Michigan Tech has really good career readiness for me.”

Fourth year graduate student Alan Larson from Grand Rapids is earning his PhD in applied physics. He was at the fair looking to try and achieve an internship with the Los Alamos national lab. He said there were a couple of openings relevant to his research, and he was hoping to get his foot in the door and get more research experience with them.

Larson explained Michigan Tech’s facilities helped him get to this point. “Our HPC facilities, our high power computation facilities, that has really helped my research and actually be able to do modern research to be able to give me the confidence to actually apply to these positions,” he said. “And my advisors in the department, the physics department in general, have been just wonderful in supporting and helping us to learn the actual material that we want to research.”