By Alison Roach
Simon Fraser Consulting holds networking event for business students

When Barry McDonald, a partner in the Tax Services practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), announced last Wednesday at the ‘Consulting with the Stars’ event that he would be talking about what his firm looks for in new employees, all the students listening visibly straightened.  This wasn’t particularly surprising, given that PwC is one of the biggest names in the consulting industry and a company from which many of the members of the audience would accept a job in a heartbeat.

This past Wednesday, Simon Fraser Consulting (SFC) and the Golden Key International Honour Society came together to put on Consulting with the Stars, a networking event that brought in over 40 consultants from 19 different consulting firms to interact with prospective employees in an intimate setting.  The event was a success, with tickets selling out and bringing in 140 attendees. Kiran Dhinsa, a current TA in the Beedie School of Business at SFU, said of her goals for the evening: “I’m looking at my options tonight; I want to find somewhere to go after school.”

This sentiment was echoed by many of the students who attended the event. They listened eagerly to those who spoke, introduced themselves and shook hands with professionals in the industry, and talked with them about their personal career experiences. The night was a chance to survey career options, to see what is available in the consulting field and even possibly make an impression. The companies represented varied from huge, well-established international networks to smaller, newer business that were looking to increase awareness through the event.

This was the first time that students from various faculties were invited to participate in an event like this. Many attending students were from business, engineering, and applied sciences, to name a few. Ehsan Jozaghi, the president of Golden Key, said, “This is the first event we’re doing, and the first time we’ve sold tickets to anyone who wants to come.” Many students, however, were invited specifically for their high GPAs.

Chris Kwong and Sam Seyfollahi, both engineering students, were invited by email to the event because of their high academic achievement, and were excited about the opportunity. Kwong lauded it as a great opportunity for students. “You get a lot of information, and to see what’s out there for after graduation.” Seyfollahi was equally enthusiastic about the event, saying, “I just got advice from one of the actual consultants, it made my day!”  Before this event, this is not an opportunity that would have been available to them as engineering students.

The event had a very open format to allow students to speak to whichever professionals they wished, as well as a round of business ‘speed-dating’.  The room was arranged with high round tables without chairs, with one or two consultants stationed at each table. Students were then put into groups and given a few minutes at each table to speak with the professional placed there before moving on to the next table at the sound of a bell. This structured session was off-balanced by more open time when the attendees and consultants were able to walk around and talk freely to whomever they wished.

This was the inaugural event for Simon Fraser Consulting, which was founded just last year. The founder of SFC, Jorge Vasquez, said of the night, “Consulting is a very elitist industry. This is a landmark event because SFU doesn’t exist in the consulting industry; the idea is to put SFU on the map.” The event was completely student organized, and even managed to bring in representatives from ‘the big four’, the four largest international professional services networks. The companies represented at the event had never recruited from SFU before according to Vasquez, who said that one of the main goals was to “showcase our talent and the human capital we have.”

Geoff Bazira, the senior product manager at Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing (SAP) and a former SFU student, summed up the tone of the night when he half-jokingly opened his speech with “I hope you don’t mind that I do a bit of a promo [for SAP], I’ll take resumes too.”