Inaugural Do Good Now career fair sees modest student turnout

520 students seeking internships, jobs and career path insights attended the inaugural Do Good Now career fair in CoDa on Wednesday. 

More than 45 organizations tabled, eager to advertise job openings and hear about students’ interests. Organizations such as GenMD, Teach for America and Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals focused on a broad range of topics from healthcare to education to law.

Organizers Lucy Zimmerman ’25 MS ’26, Georgia Walker-Keleher ’26 and Josh Delgadillo ’26 decided they wanted to host a public service-focused career fair last summer. 

Zimmerman, who is involved with Stanford Tech for Liberation, is passionate about helping students consider the consequences of their labor. She found that once students understand the potentially harmful impacts of their labor for tech and defense corporations, they struggle to find alternative career pathways. For Zimmerman, a career fair seemed like an actionable solution to this, to inform students of their options, whether that be nonprofits, startups or venture capital.

On a road trip to Big Sur, Zimmerman asked Walker-Keleher if she wanted to lead a career fair. Walker-Keleher lived in the Otero public service dorm her freshman and sophomore years, where service opportunities were readily available. Then, in her junior year, Walker-Keleher and her friends started thinking about careers after graduation. “A lot of my headspace was about what not to do,” she said. “A lot of people come into Stanford and they want to go into banking or work at a nonprofit, but most people are somewhere in between.” Walker-Keleher wanted to cater to that group and platform other jobs. 

Inspired by the CS+ Social Good career fair last year, Zimmerman and Walker-Keleher reached out to Delgadillo for help. 

As CS+ Social Good President, Delgadillo found that many freshmen were enthusiastic about the program but would lose interest as they got older. “I figured that what shouldn’t be happening is that people come in interested and then stop being interested because they can’t find a job. That’s how I got into thinking about how we can make career pipelines more obvious for students.” 

Zimmerman, Walker-Keleher and Delgadillo felt the fair could add to the career landscape at Stanford. “I think a lot of people think of CareerEd as the mainstream and Haas as alternative and awesome. We are aiming to show students that they can do things that are good for the world and have it be mainstream,” said Walker-Keleher. 

The trio started organizing the event in fall quarter. They received administrative support from the Haas Center for Public Service and CareerEd and mentorship from the Center for Human Rights. “[Deputy Director of the Haas Center] Luke Terra really believed in us from the beginning,” said Walker-Keleher. 

Zimmerman, Walker-Keleher and Delgadillo also worked with a coalition of Voluntary Student Organizations (VSOs), including Stanford Tech for Liberation, CS+ Social Good, Stanford Public Interest Technology (PIT) lab and Stanford Students for Educational Equity. “Something unique about this fair having involved a much broader coalition of organizations and people from different spaces on campus is that everybody has some kind of vertical, and that’s definitely broadened the array of companies that we’ve been able to have,” said Delgadillo.

“People’s willingness to help and jump in has been awesome. Shout out to the person in my dorm who connected me with an organization that they worked at last summer. My residents made our logo, and another girl from my dorm just decided today to help chip in on the charcuterie board to make salami flowers,” said Walker-Keleher. 

Such collaboration was integral to pulling the fair together, so that when the day finally arrived, organizers expressed excitement about the turnout and students’ enthusiasm.  

“It was a super success. I never doubted it for a second because from a lot of conversations I’ve had with people, regardless of how much you know about social impact, everyone was interested in a venue to essentially find jobs that were meaningful,” said Zimmerman. 

Vaishnavi Kumbala ’29 attended the fair to learn about potential career paths. “One thing that surprised me was the diversity of different options at the career fair. It’s easy to think about a narrow subset when you’re thinking about a career, but it’s cool to explore a lot of different things, and I feel like I was really able to do that today,” Kumbala said. 

Priyanka Patel ’29 attended both the Do Good Now career fair and an earlier career fair focused on sustainability. “The one I went to for sustainability was much more Stanford-oriented. So this was definitely different because there were actual companies,” Patel said. “This felt more focused on full-time work as opposed to internships.” 

Now, Zimmerman, Walker-Keleher and Delgadillo must determine what will happen to the Do Good Now initiative after they graduate. They are now planning ways to institutionalize the event and its message.

“The spring project is to think about how we can keep [Do Good Now initiative] this awesome grassroots scrappiness and those collaborations between VSOs, while also getting a level of support that makes it lasting,” Walker-Keleher said.

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