Students clutching resumes lined up shoulder to shoulder in the Tutor Campus Center Ballroom, inching toward tables draped in startup companies’ banners and lined with half-empty coffee cups.

The Startup Career Fair, hosted by Spark SC on Thursday, brought 25 startups to campus, including student-founded ventures and companies backed by major venture capital firms. Organizers said they anticipated roughly 1,000 students in attendance, with about 350 confirmed sign-ups leading up to the event. Each startup was hiring for multiple roles across engineering, product, business development and design.

Spark SC is a USC student organization that fosters entrepreneurship by providing students with resources, mentorship and direct access to startup opportunities and founders. For Spark leaders Diora Juraboeva, a senior majoring in arts, technology and the business of innovation,  and Bona Suh, a junior majoring in computer science games, the event reflected a growing shift in how USC students think about careers.

“Startup Career Fair has been a tradition that Spark has run almost annually since 2015 when Spark started,” Juraboeva said. “The point of the Startup Career Fair specifically was to connect really passionate, talented, entrepreneurial-minded students with high-growth startup opportunities, and just give startups the opportunity to recruit really great students from USC.”

Suh said that many students still feel unsure about how to break into startup spaces.

“I feel like startups are an anomaly for a lot of students; they don’t really know how to get involved,” Suh said. “There’s this idea that you have to have a lot of experience to get involved in a startup. But by bringing all these startups who are so interested in these students, it’s our way of showing them … that students can be very bold and very ambitious.”

The organizers said that startups hire differently from large corporations. Juraboeva said physical, in-person interaction is especially valuable in this ecosystem.

“The special thing about startups is that you’re able to go to the Startup Career Fair and meet, literally, the founder of the company and have a direct conversation with them, and show yourselves to them,” Juraboeva said. “You can leave the career fair and actually have their contact, and then you can email them and have a real relationship built there.”

For Cecilia Zeng, a freshman majoring in behavioral economics and psychology, the appeal of the fair was less about securing an offer and more about “feeling the vibe.” After speaking with a founder, she said she noticed a stark difference from traditional career fairs.

“I feel like it’s a mutual choice,” Zeng said. “They’re trying to get to know more about me. I tried to get to know more about them, instead of a big company where they expect me to know everything about them. It feels like there’s a real, genuine human connection established.”

Gabriel Janna, a graduate student studying business administration, said he attended the fair to explore emerging industries and startup culture.

“I’m here to just learn about different potential startup opportunities, get a good understanding of what’s out there,” Janna said. “I think a startup is an environment where everything is kind of just drinking from the [hose], and so it’s a good experience.”

Having previously worked at a growth-stage company, Janna said the appeal of startups was the ownership and visibility.

“Startups have more flexibility, more room to grow, when you grow with the company,” Janna said. “When you grow your skills and progress, so does the company. You can really see the impact quite easily.”

That sense of impact is also what Vartul Agrawal, chief technology officer of an e-commerce marketplace for trading cards and collectibles, said he hoped to offer. Agrawal said his team had spoken to around 60 students during the event and is hiring for roughly 10 different roles, often with multiple head counts. When asked about the biggest difference between startups and established corporations, Agrawal summed it up in one phrase: “red tape.”

“With a startup, you’re contributing to the actual code base from day one. We want you to succeed with the startup,” Agrawal said. “I won’t say it’s easy. Startup life is 24/7, but you reap the benefits of it.”

Agrawal said he recognizes that the industry is “leaning more towards AI” and it is reshaping industries. Janna said he predicts barriers to entry into different industries to continue to fall.

“It’s going to be easier to create startups,” he said. “You can use agents that can help with research. They can help with developing a business plan. So it’s commoditizing the whole costs that would typically be associated with the startup.”

According to Juraboeva, Spark SC’s broader mission is to foster entrepreneurship on campus and strengthen ties between USC students and the Los Angeles startup ecosystem.

“Going forward, we would love to have stronger partnerships with the L.A. startup community, and be able to build a stronger pipeline of students coming out of USC,” Juraboeva said. “I think that the Startup Career Fair is like one step in building those strong relationships over time.”

Eventually, in a job market where traditional recruiting pipelines feel increasingly uncertain, one message echoed across attendees.

“Keep focusing on entrepreneurship,” Janna said. “It’s really what USC should focus on as its bread and butter, because it’s really the future.”