I’m writing this entry while in Palo Alto, CA at a career fair at Stanford University during my week’s stay in San Francisco from Austin. The reason I got here isn’t really part of this story as much as the observations associated with the event. I think what’s actually more integral to my account is that this is quite literally the first time I’ve been to a career fair.

Not once in my college career at the University of Texas—a major university in its own right—did I attend a function like this. I can imagine with some level of fabricated detail (read: unabashed speculation), that the vibe would be very similar to what I’m observing right now.

The exhibit hall that houses the humid four hours of what-do-you-do’s is strikingly similar to the Texas Union Ballroom. This is where final portfolio review occurs for Texas Creative—UT’s creative portfolio program in advertising. The similarities end in the décor and all familiarity from my end is out the window from this point on.

At Stanford, ambitious prospective undergrads and MBAs push each other around in tucked in business casual hues of blue, vying to have their resumés dog-eared by headhunters and in-house recruiters for some of the more well-known and some not so well-known names in web 2.0. Companies your mom has never heard of pass out t-shirts, stickers, buttons and cookies in exchange for students’ resumés with the smallest margins Microsoft Word will allow them. A recruiter from one of the companies mentions that the university hosts a career fair about once a month.

As an entrepreneur myself and a self-professed startup aficionado (albeit in a different state completely), I am in absolute heaven 2.0. But, I ask myself, how is it that developers and engineers get to have all of the attention from startup companies at an event like this and I am seemingly (and only by random chance) the only designer in the house?

I’ll completely take the blame for this situation. I mean, it’s completely my fault for crashing the career fair of one of the world’s leading technology universities as one of them right-brained people (not to say at ALL that developers and engineers aren’t creative in their own right).

I decide to test out the waters anyway and drum up conversations with some of the names I recognize—some are established internet companies and some are more stealth companies I’ve come across on TechCrunch or via friends in the Valley. I decide that the worst that could happen is I meet some cool people to hang out with while they’re in town for SXSW next month.

Four of the six companies are completely caught off guard with a designer in their midst—they have pretty much nothing to say to me. One of the larger companies has a job posting online that they’re using to capture portfolios and resumés for a design position. The sixth group is already an established name you would recognize in the instant messaging space and is currently hiring a visual designer. All of the companies look at me inquisitively (hipster jeans, wtf?!).

So what have I learned from this experience?

As a whole, startup web companies don’t value designers. Or, I should say, startup web companies don’t value designers like they value developers.

A few days later, while having lunch with Monica Corona, one of my  copywriting partners from college in the Hayes Valley neighborhood back in San Francisco, we discussed her not-by-choice freelance copywriter status. While calling up ad agencies in the area, she discovered that art director positions were readily available, but that agencies weren’t interested in copywriters in “this kind of economy.” While one industry is valuing the knowledge workers that have made it what it is today from garages on the west coast, agencies headquartered on the east coast strive to acquire creatives to their Madison Avenue offices.

While being a participant in both of these industries for over six years now, my overall observation is this: these industries are strikingly similar and actually require the same kind of people to make successful companies. Job requirements and proficiencies aside, what these industries are ultimately seeking are creative people (that’s right, I just called developers the c-word). This is just an area I’ve only begun to explore, but I have a feeling I’ll be making lots of similar observations as I begin to flesh out this hypothesis as part of my daily writing practice. I’ve not even begun to think this all through and expect to analyze this dichotomy from the other side as well (do designers need to see themselves as more technical/geeky/white and nerdy?). One thing is definitely for certain: attending my first job fair was an inadvertent success—no matter how smelly it was.

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