On Thursday, November 3rd, the Idealist Graduate School Fair comes to the University of Houston (MD Anderson Library, Rockwell Pavilion Room) for the first time to connect potential students looking to make a difference in the world with over 50 of the nations leading institutions that educate and prepare our nations public service leaders and practitioners.
With the economy in a slump, and many uncertain about the near term economic future, a growing number of today’s college students are planning to pursue graduate or professional education as a buffer to assure future career competitiveness. Even many of those who have already graduated and entered the workforce are returning to school in order to assure advancement in their field. And for many of these students and graduates, the fields they want to pursue have a humanitarian, community, or public service outlook.
Fortunately, career experts already predict some of the fastest growing fields of the future will be related to these interests. Given changes in our population, urbanization, globalization, and more concern for environmental protections, they anticipate substantial growth in careers related to sustainability, health care, counseling, social services, urban planning and public health. And these fields, combined with the perennials of education, law, public policy and foreign affairs, all make up a multitude of public interest related careers that now no longer only exist in government or non-profits settings, but also within an growing number of private sector and consulting settings.
UH graduate student Cloe Walker represents part of this trend. Having finished a bachelors degree at Rice several years ago, she spent a year in Austin as an 
AmeriCorps childhood literacy tutor working, while also spending her own volunteer time with a court-appointed child advocacy program. The experiences combined to show her she wanted to make a bigger difference in the life of kids. Thus she choose a unique duel degree program at UH that combines Social Work and Law.
Walker says, “When doing my literacy tutoring I could see I was doing necessary work, but I also saw many kids had issues at home that were impeding them. And as a volunteer I could also see the power of advocacy in the courtroom.”
The Idealist Fair:
To satisfy needs like this comes the development of traveling informational events like the Idealist Graduate School Fair, which will make its first Houston appearance this Thursday, Nov 3rd at UH. Hosted in cities across the nation for over a decade, these events bring a wide array of graduate college representatives to cities to talk about the education and professional offerings their schools can provide interested students.
In attendance at the Houston event will be over 50 leading graduate and professional college programs from schools from as far away as New York City and Honolulu to schools right here in Texas. Click here to see full list.
Over the next few days we will tell you more about some of these fields and the schools attending.