Not quite a job fair and not quite a pub crawl.
The Silicon Prairie Job Crawl is an event held in the MasterCraft Building near TD Ameritrade. It’s a good chance to meet people, get free Jimmy John’s, and even land a job.
This is probably the fifth Silicon Prairie event I’ve gone to, the first being the Job Crawl last March. It’s funny how I’m starting to get questions like, “that name sounds familiar,” or “have we met before?” Yes. We probably did, most likely at the Slowdown after a few free drinks.
I gotta say, I absolutely love these kinds of events.
The last Job Crawl I went to was pretty overwhelming, mostly because I had no idea there was such a large community of small businesses in Omaha. Before then, I thought the job market for CS mainly consisted of ConAgra, Gallup, and various IT companies. Learning about the wealth of opportunity, as well as talking with many people in various industries in the span of a few hours completely blew me away, and I even scored an Internship after chatting with VoterTide.
This time, I felt like I had become more apart of the startup community, having met lots of people at various events, connecting with people online, working at VoterTide this summer, and trying to be as active as possible. Walking in, I had already said hi to several people I already knew, recognized many names on the program, and even chatted with a few people who shared mutual acquaintances.
Nothing compared to being able to talk to the different people present though. Going from table-to-table talking to Grain & Mortar, Sojern, McCarthy Capital, Hudl, Silicon Prairie News, and, of course, VoterTide, I got such a rush from talking to all of the people involved in these companies. Whether it was a conversation about Python vs. Ruby, learning about how investment works, or chatting about possible future interactions, every conversation was fun, interesting, and left me feeling more excited walking out than walking in.
The other fun part was talking to the other participants. Most are looking for internships or careers, and all of them are interested in talking to each other. I had several conversations about startup life, internships, and even a debate about the value of design vs. development, as well as discussing collaborating on freelance work. There is nothing quite like the possibility of future opportunity.
Which is really what this whole community of startups is about: working together. The business world is pretty cutthroat, but the community of these businesses is friendly, encouraging, and exciting. Talking to people about things that inspire and motivate them allows people to talk about their dreams, and I’ve often found that in the pursuit of people’s dreams, they are encouraging towards the dreams of others.
Which makes me excited. Excited to become more apart of this community, excited to keep doing what I’m doing, but most of all, excited to keep pursuing my own dreams.
