The Career Services Office of Kent State’s College of Business Administration held a “Preview Night of Networking” event Wednesday on the third floor of the Student Center from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

The university’s employer advisory council planned the event in the fall to give students a chance to meet with professionals and give them a preview of the business students.

“Employers asked us to have something specific geared towards business majors,” said Erin Nunn, director of the Career Services Office.

Over 80 students registered for the networking event where they will have the opportunity to network with several businesses and organizations Kent has relations with, like Verizon, Aldi, Quicken Loans and Target.

“We sent out an invite to all of our business employers and any employer that was already registered for the spring career fair, and we had 18 organizations confirm and about 27 representatives showed up,” Nunn said.

Students like junior business management major Megan Wandel knew the number of successful companies at the event students, and prepared accordingly.

“I worked with my advisor over there in the college of business and she helped a lot on how to network,” she said. “I went to the previous networking events as well, so that helped a lot too.”

Kent alumni Jen Fortuna, senior university relationships manager, represented Quicken Loans.

“With Kent being pretty local, we typically only take about 25 interns for our Cleveland office,” Fortuna said.

As the Cleveland office focuses on sales, Fortuna informed Kent State students about a summer internship in Detroit.

“We take about 1,000 interns to downtown Detroit for our summer internship program and were looking for more of those finance — maybe HR — students as well for that program.”

Students, upon signing up, were given a list of companies that would be present.

“I want to be a part of a big company, so I planned on talking to those companies here,” said Hongda Zhuang, senior accounting major.

“I am really big on working together,” Wandel said. “I’m looking for a company that values relationships with their employees.”

Malcolm Murray is the Colleges of Business and Technology reporter, contact him at [email protected].