Texas Wesleyan’s Career Services hosted its annual Graduate and Professional School Fair on Thursday at Lou’s Place.

The fair included 30 representatives from 30 schools, including Texas Christian University, Texas A&M and the University of Texas and Arlington.

Director of Career Services Gary L. Stout said Career Services is doing something a little different with this fair this year by bringing representatives from more social work programs.

“We are giving students a lot more interests in larger schools than we have in the past,” Stout said. “For Career Services, one of our goals is to get students to the next place.”

Stout said that this fair has three schools with social work programs that were not in attendance last year, including TCU, UTA and Tarleton State.

“We have more interests in social work programs now, “Stout said. “So it just gives students an opportunity to come and talk to somebody face to face who actually manages the admission process for a program.”

Tonie M. Broussard, academic program specialist for the department of social work at TCU said that it’s not too early to start applying for their program.

“It’s not too early because our applications open up around Oct. 1,” Broussard said. “So if you are interested in thinking about applying, there are things you can start pulling together like recommendation letters from your professors.”

Wesleyan senior psychology of religion major Marco Sun thinks that getting recommendations from your professors is important.

“You have to know what you want to do in your career path,” Sun said.

Assistant Director of Career Services Michael Gatten thinks that it’s important for students to get into grad school because the work that they want to do may eventually require higher education.

“Coming to this fair is a great opportunity to discuss with various schools about their graduate programs, so if you want to be a lawyer you got to get a law degree, if you want to be a doctor you got to get a medical degree,” Gatten said. “So coming to this fair gives you a chance to talk to a bunch of schools in one spot.”

Senior history major Rebecca Norris, who is looking for a program in library science and wants to be an archivist, said that she wasn’t even planning on getting into grad school until she came to this fair.

“My history instructor, Dr. Stephanie Stegman, recommended this fair to me,” Norris said. “She encouraged me to come out even if I’m not planning on going to grad school and see what it’s all about. I’m glad I did.”

Norris is one of those students that likes to plan ahead.

“The more I plan ahead the more there will be less mistakes in my future,” she said.