The Marshall Student Center Amphitheater was transformed into a live stage March 21, as four student bands competed in the Campus Advisory Board’s third Battle of the Bands with hopes of filling opening spots in the annual Bullstock concert on April 12.

The winning acts, Variance and South of Holly, will open for national acts All-American Rejects, Owl City and Hot Chelle Rae at the concert.

The 28th annual Miss International Pageant, named “Petals of Distinction,” will take place Saturday, March 23 in the Marshall Student Center Oval Theater.

Every year, the pageant selects one international contestant to be named Miss International from a collection of women representing various countries and cultures.

New campus dining locations Pollo Tropical, Panda Express and Papa John’s Pizza will be arriving at USF this spring.

Pollo Tropical, a South Florida-based Caribbean restaurant, will be opening in the former Burger King location next to Cooper Hall and the University Lecture Hall.

The USF Career Center’s spring 2013 career fair series begins Jan.25, with the Accounting Career Fair, and continues on Jan. 30 with the All Majors Career Fair and Jan. 31 with the Science, Technology and Engineering Career Fair.

The career fairs bring representatives from dozens of potential employers, searching to fill full-time, co-op and internship positions for jobs requiring everything from financial know-how to physics.

In this feature, we’ll be taking a look at 2013’s career fairs by the numbers to discover what fields and majors have the most opportunities, what kind of companies are being represented and what majors might wish to look elsewhere for career assistance.

By the Numbers:

Represented Majors in Order of Employers Present
(Minus positions applicable to “all majors”)

Computer Science and Engineering                                    14 Employers
Electrical Engineering                                                          12 Employers
General Business                                                                10 Employers
Mechanical Engineering                                                        9 Employers
Information Technology (IT)                                                  9 Employers
Marketing                                                                               9 Employers
Management                                                                           9 Employers
Economics                                                                              8 Employers
Chemical Engineering                                                              6 Employers
Finance                                                                             6 Employers
Communications                                                                  5 Employers
Accounting                                                                         5 Employers
International Business                                                          5 Employers
Civil and Environmental Engineering                                         4 Employers
Industrial and Management Systems Engineering                       4 Employers
Business Economics                                                             4 Employers
Management Information Systems (MIS)                                 4 Employers
Mathematics                                                                       3 Employers
Chemistry                                                                           2 Employers
Hotel and Restaurant Management                                          2 Employers
Advertising                                                                          2 Employers
Criminology                                                                         1 Employer
English                                                                               1 Employer
Mass Communications                                                           1 Employer
Physics                                                                               1 Employer
Biomedical Sciences                                                              1 Employer
Biology                                                                               1 Employer
Microbiology                                                                         1 Employer

Most Represented Industries

Financial Services                  10 Employers
Insurance                             8 Employers
Retail                                   7 Employers
Sales                                    4 Employers
Technology                            4 Employers
Education                              4 Employers

Most Desired Position Types

Full-time position                  64 Employers
Internship                           27 Employers
Co-Op                                  1 Employer

The Jan.30 “All Majors” fair will feature 55 employers, while more focused “Science, Technology and Engineering” fair will feature 25 employers Jan. 31.

Thirty-eight employers will be surveying for positions applicable to all majors, representing more than half of the fair’s employers. “All Majors” employers will only be present at the Jan. 30 “All Majors” fair.

“By the Numbers” employer information taken from here.

Kelly Rzeszut, the USF Career Center’s special events coordinator, clarified what employers will be looking for at the “All Majors” fair.

“It’s the companies that are looking to hire all majors. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be companies for every single major, but we have a lot of companies that aren’t looking for majors,” Rzeszut said. “They’re looking for skill sets and personality types.”

Rzeszut said past career fairs have brought in thousands of students, and much of the fairs’ positive feedback comes not from the students, but the companies that hire them.

“We hear a lot of good success stories from the employers. They fill out a survey and let us know how many students they think they made contact with,” Rzeszut said. “Typically, employers will say anything from only talking to 40 students to 150 plus students. Many of them indicate that they’re going to follow up with between 10 and 20 students.”

Beyond the jobs that career fairs can offer qualified students, the fairs and similar events give students and alumni the invaluable gift of experience.

“The whole point of a career networking fair is to hopefully prepare you for a job, or to help you find a job, but it’s also great networking,”  Rzeszut said. “It can help build your people skills and give you an opportunity to meet with different employers from different types of industries. For a student that isn’t entirely sure what they want to do, it’s a great opportunity to learn from the professionals working in the field.”

Career Center fairs are held in the Marshall Student Center Ballroom. Professional attire is required and suits are preferred. Participants in casual attire will not be admitted into the fairs.

Students in need of professional attire are recommended to try out Suit-a-Bull, a free suit rental service organized by Students In Free Enterprise. Students must make an appointment for the service 72 hours in advance.

The Career Center’s Internship and Part-time Job Fair will be held April 10, in the SVC Breezeway. Casual or business casual attire is appropriate.

The fairs are exclusive to USF students and alumni and a valid USF ID is required for admittance.

Students are advised to update their resumes before the fair, research employers at the fairs beforehand for a best fit and attend career fair workshops or find tips online to prepare.

This year, USF adopted Canvas, a learning management system (LMS) by educational software company Instructure, to replace the long-running Blackboard system.

The company, founded in 2008, boasts integration in over 200 colleges and universities, and more than 50 k-12 school districts. The University of Central Florida made the switch to Canvas last fall.

Conservation proponent and television wildlife personality Jeff Corwin hosted fall’s final University Lecture Series (ULS) event, Nov. 15, in an evening heavy with environmental awareness and a call for the preservation of global biodiversity.

Corwin used his animal expertise and humor to introduce the audience to numerous exotic and native animal species, including kinkajou, zebu, mink, Barred Owl, Burmese Python and Russia’s domesticated silver fox, an experimental morph of the common red fox.

Tying concepts and the consequences of ecosystem loss into his lecture, Corwin encouraged the audience to understand the human-animal reliances that balance our ecosystems and act with the natural future in mind.

“Our biggest challenge to conservation is people don’t feel connected to nature,” Corwin said. “You can’t protect what you do not care about and you can’t care about something if you don’t know it.”

Corwin concluded his lecture with an open Q-and-A session with students, addressing everything from conservationist advice, close encounters with poachers and his dangerous ordeal with a young elephant on CNN’s “Planet in Peril” in 2007.

“You can still put your seatbelt on and die in a car accident,” Corwin said, putting the incident into perspective. “You have a problem with an elephant, you may not get out of it. You just try to be careful. I think that elephant thing was the only time I ever thought, ‘Holy moly, this may not work up.’”

Corwin’s lecture served many purposes, providing answers to the curious, entertainment to the bored or even inspiration, in the case of pre-veterinary junior Lauren Koos.

“I’m interested in characters that are very much involved in helping animals and awareness of conversation,” said Koos, who arrived at the Marshall Student Center hours before the lecture to ensure good seating.

Jeff Corwin rose to prominence in the early 2000s with his acclaimed and wildly popular Animal Planet program, “The Jeff Corwin Experience,” and Disney’s “Going Wild with Jeff Corwin.” He currently stars in ABC’s “Ocean Mysteries with Jeff Corwin” and has had programs on Food Network, Travel Channel, and MSNBC.

Before Corwin took to the stage, ULS organizers rewarded students for completing a Facebook “like” challenge by tossing 100 ULS t-shirts into the audience, and announced the lineup for spring 2012’s lecture series:

Jan. 13: Football analyst and philanthropist Herm Edwards

March 4: Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Jerry Greenfield

April 9: Grammy-winning singer/songwriter John Legend

INTERVIEW:

ULS organizers and Corwin were able to manage time for a quick split-interview before the lecture with Bulls Radio and USF News.

What do you feel is the most pressing environmental conservation effort, or project today, and what role does that play on the global scale?

Corwin: I think one of the greatest challenges we face is we live in an age of extinction. Unfortunately, during the last debate and election, all of this stuff gets lost. We lose a species of life on our planet about every half an hour. It’s gone forever. We lose more animals, plants and life-forms today than was lost 65 million years ago, in the wipeout of the dinosaurs. It’s been argued as the “sixth extinction.”

When we lose life, we not only lose an aesthetic element to our planet: We lose a resource. It could be a cure for some sort of disease; It could be a resource we depend upon as food; It could be a life-form that interconnects to an ecosystem that makes it whole and complete, and drive it. We are losing things before we even can identify them, and I think extinction today is, to me, one of the biggest issues.

The cause of extinction is basically four or five factors, and they’re all equally deleterious. They’re all equally terrible: Habitat loss, pollution, environmental degradation, the unsustainable exploitation of species and human population growth. All these factors, habitat loss, climate change, human population growth and environmental pollution, work together; They conspire together and they don’t work in a vacuum. Habitat loss, “cut down the trees, burn it down and make room for agriculture,” contributes to climate change. So you see how they work together. Cut down the habitat, access of the animals, and sell them to the black market trade. They conspire to make it the perfect extinction story.

My new series that I’ve had, actually season two for “Ocean Mysteries,” which is a series running on ABC, has opened my eyes to the great challenges we face in the ocean, which finds its way into that pie of extinction, I’m sure. The thing that’s really shocked me, filming “Ocean Mysteries,” is that no matter where we go, the bottom of some deep abyss off of Alaska, filming Stellar sea lions or somewhere in a cave in the middle of the archipelago off of Hawaii, filming manta rays or a remote beach, filming nesting albatrosses, we find trash. We’ve polluted our oceans. It’s really inspired me to do a few projects, and one of them is an e-book coming out around the end of November. It’s designed to really use this sort of 21st century technology, the sort of trans-media, interactive technology of video, footage, narration and classic literature reading to combine all together in this really cool, interactive e-book. The first book is called “Sharks,” because nothing says more about what’s happening to our planet than sharks. Ninety percent of all shark species are in trouble, and 70 percent of our sharks are endangered. These are animals that have been around, some of the first creatures on our planet.

How did your passion for conservation and wildlife involvement start, and how did you turn that into the career it’s been?

Corwin: Well, I’ve always loved critters and nature; I’ve always had a fascination for the natural world. I was a city kid at first: Until I was about eight or nine years old, I lived in a very urban environment, in an apartment building. My dad delivered doughnuts, worked at a printing shop and then became a police officer. I put my mom through school to become a nurse, so you can’t really say a “Rockefeller background.”

I needed nature. I would go to my grandparents, who lived in a farming community, and I’d go up to the pastures, to that rural area and look for critters, and that’s where it all began. It just crystallized and germinated. I remember finding my first snake when I was six years old, and that was the lightning bolt that struck me, that said “No matter what I do, when I grow up, I want to work with animals in some capacity.”

I had a very unconventional life. I started out kind of ordinary, and by the time I was sixteen I was living in a rainforest, on the front lines of rainforest conservation that in the 80s created one of the first rainforest organizations, and in the late 80s created one of the first national parks with this foundation we created in Paraguay. This was my passion.

I was down living in Central America, kind of fingering my way, feeling my way, trying to find out what I was going to do for research. I got featured in a documentary, and I knew that I was in the wrong path. I did go to graduate school, but my passion wasn’t “lost in a jungle, doing important research,” but was to be a communicator, to be there to be a sort of conduit; To take that scientist’s information, that she or he has done, and translate it for a mass audience.

So, what was it like filming “The Jeff Corwin Experience?” A lot of us did grow up watching it.

Corwin: Yeah, that was my second series. My first series was called “Going Wild,” on Disney. That was the first series that really had been on television since Marlin Perkins’ Mutual of Omaha. I did that for three years for Disney, and I was one of the first new Disney stars with the rebranding of the network. Then I went back and finished graduate school, and then went on to Animal Planet.

It’s funny. I’ve been on television now for almost 17 years, and I’ve had ten different series; A series on the Food Network, and now I have a series on ABC, the highest rated series for 2012. Everyone, that’s what they remember: “The Jeff Corwin Experience.” It was a delight; It was a joy because I created that series and it was really different.

It was very funny when Animal Planet was entertaining the idea of taking me on board. They were like, “Oh, he’s too kid-ish,” or, “He’s too young,” and someone sent them an outtakes reel of me being me, and they said “If you can do your outtakes reel, and you can combine that with nature…” It was really an incredible experience. It was very different, and I’m very grateful for it because it allowed me to do the things that I’m doing now.

It was great, but I don’t wallow on stuff, I move on, you know? You move on, and you evolve, and that’s how you survive in the very competitive, unforgiving environment of television. Again, right now, I think this is my twelfth or thirteenth TV series. I’m just glad I keep going.

What was the most memorable experience that you’ve had? There’re so many, and you’ve worked in so many continents and been to so many places, but do you have any memories that jump out at you from working in the field, on or off camera?

Corwin: Incredible moments in doing this… I think, probably for me, a moment that really resonates is in itself a small moment. We’ve gone and taken orangutans and released them back into a rainforest, and we’ve gone with gorillas, and giant snakes… I think for me was a moment being with the scientists when a very special, iconic frog of Panama became extinct. They only lived in captivity. We kind of went on a “fool’s errand” in the area where they were, and we found one, alive, which became a critical part of the reestablishment of this species. That to me was an amazing moment. To see a species that had become officially extinct, with the scientists, as it was rediscovered… That glimmer of hope for the species to me was a great moment.

With this series, “Ocean Mysteries,” we’ve had amazing moments. We spent six weeks in Alaska this summer, and I remember being on a helicopter with a scientist from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, darting a giant grizzly bear as it slid down an ice slope to get a satellite collar, jumping off, securing the bear, and just sitting there, blue sky, mountaintop with a grizzly bear in your lap. You think, “Wow, I’m getting paid for this.” Could be working a toll-booth.

Obviously, you have a message of conservation for all the students tonight, but did you want to expand on that with what your goal is for coming here tonight and educating everyone?

Corwin: Well, really, we’re all accountable; There’s no excuse. I used to be the science correspondent for NBC, and I covered the oil spill. Whenever there’s a big environmental issue, someone brings me in and I cover it, and life gets back to normal and people forget about oil spills. There was not one conversation between a journalist, Romney, or President Obama about “What about the future of life on Earth? What about climate change? What about these major factors that are affecting our planet, and the success of all life on Earth?” That bothers me. I want to remind everyone that we all have responsibility to be stewards for our planet, and that’s why I do what I do.

Ultimately, who you’re punishing is not me, you’re not punishing yourself, you’re not even punishing nature; You’re punishing my two daughters, because they will inherit a world that is less biologically rich, healthy and diverse as the one we had. If you want a crash-course to extinction, deny your species resources they need to survive, and you’ll be just like the dodo bird.

A torrent of exotic culture, crafts and cuisine overtook the MLK Plaza, Nov. 15, in USF’s 3rd annual International Festival.

Annual technology expo and self-proclaimed “nerd convention,” SuperNerd 2012 united USF’s technology and video game cultures in the Marshall Student Center Ballroom with hacking competitions, catered dinners and prized raffle items.

Annual technology expo and self-proclaimed “nerd convention,” SuperNerd 2012 united USF’s technology and video game cultures in the Marshall Student Center Ballroom with hacking competitions, catered dinners and prized raffle items.

A crowded row of video game stations, representing old and new consoles, lined the north wall of the ballroom, and featured franchises like Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart, Modern Warfare and Sonic Adventure.

Students could also meet, eat and socialized over rounds poker at one of the event’s three poker tables, or set up their own online video game stations with their laptops.

A hacking competition, organized by USF’s own Whitehatters Computer Security Club, ran throughout the expo. The winner of the competition (by point-value, earned through a variety of CTF missions) received Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

Whitehatters Computer Security Club also set up tables and displays of interactive lock-picking activities, which many students used to test their nimble fingers in maneuvering handcuffs and padlocks.

“I honestly think that having the Whitehatters was a good idea, because a lot of people are interested in that,” student Eli Zucker said, as he loaded up a match of popular zombie game Left 4 Dead 2 on his computer. “As a Criminology major, I was interested in a lot of stuff they were showing there as well.”

Zucker pointed to Createch USF’s active advertising campaign as a possible reason for SuperNerd’s success, and also proposed some ideas for next year’s showcase.

“Maybe do a dance competition, or maybe do what they’re doing with the video game tournament. Have it be SuperNerd plus a video game tournament, 32-player brackets, that kind of thing,“ he said.

All attendees of SuperNerd received a free raffle ticket at the door after checking in, for Createch’s highly anticipated raffling throughout the afternoon. Prizes included a Kindle Fire tablet, Apple and Google Play gift cards, video game pre-order cards and Magic: The Gathering playing cards.

The SuperNerd event, now an annual tradition organized by Createch USF, began in 2010.

“People wanted to have a showcase of what web development was, and over time it became what it is now,” said Createch USF president Yasser Adnan. “This year we had a really good turnout.”

Createch USF, one of our university’s more prominent student technology organizations, is a relatively young group, with strong roots in computer development.

“There was a group of kids that felt there was no club that promoted web development, computer programming and such, and they made what’s called Web Developer’s Network. Over time, that became Createch,” Adnan said.

The Marshall Student Center Amphitheater was coated in green Oct. 16 as students, sustainability activists and supporters gathered for the USF Student Environmental Association’s 5^th annual GreenStock event.

Fruits, vegetables and vegan sandwiches were provided for students, as well as iced tea samples from Kaleisia Tea Lounge. Craft tables were also set up for students to make origami flowers, and bracelets from soda can tabs.

A series of live bands filled the amphitheater air with music, while numerous activist speakers took to the stage to present their cases on environmental issues like mountaintop removal in mining and various sustainability concerns.

Many environmental organizations were represented at the event, including Greenpeace, GreenCan.org, the USF Birdhouse Buying Club and the Sierra Club. Safezone Recycling also had a table at GreenStock, showcasing their AdPower Optimizer, an at-home energy recycler.

“When energy comes through a power source, it heats up,” Safezone representative Maurice Vernon said, after a demonstration of the power-saving Optimizer. “This recycles that energy and takes it back to your household.”

Joseph Michalsky is an active member of the USF Student Environmental Association, and coordinator of this year’s GreenStock.

“We try to showcase some of the different environmental opportunities that are available to students in the community,” Michalsky said. “Environment is something that most students care about, but usually it’s on the backburner of the mind, so this brings it out to them.”

GreenStock 2012 was organized by the USF Student Environmental Association, in collaboration with Net Impact, the USF Anthropology Club, and Students Protecting the Environment and Animals thru Knowledge (SPEAK).