This year's campus job recruitment fair drew a record number of companies touting more job openings than ever to NTU on March 8 during the month-long NTU Azalea Festivities.

The annual job fair comes around as a major event on the calendars of leading local enterprises in search of fresh talent. Therefore, online registration for this year's allotments of booth space along Royal Palm Boulevard and Fan Palm Avenue were completely taken in just over three minutes. The eagerness of local enterprises bears witness to the improving economic climate and reflects their need for outstanding talent and strong desire to hire NTU graduates.

Each year in March, the NTU Career Center organizes the job fair and related career counseling and training events for our graduating students. This year's events were a resounding success, attracting a total of 259 companies.

The job fair featured 240 businesses occupying 356 booth spaces. While 70 companies held additional information sessions on campus, 16 enterprises arranged for students to take part in excursions to visit their offices and facilities. Spanning such sectors as technology, finance, media, manufacturing, medicine, and service, and including representatives from the public sectors, such as the Ministry of National Defense as well as state-run enterprises under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the participants offered a record of more than 20,000 job vacancies.

NTU President Pan-Chyr Yang presided over the fair's opening ceremony, during which Ming-Kai Tsai, the chairman and CEO of Taiwanese chip maker MediaTek Inc., was invited to speak on behalf of the business community. Chairman Tsai, who is an alumnus of the NTU Department of Electrical Engineering, has built MediaTek Inc. into one of the world's top-three fabless semiconductor companies.

As NTU strives to fulfill its educational mission, it will continue to collaborate with the business community to cultivate talented professionals and contribute to local Taiwanese society.