Have you ever felt tired from your marrow to your toes, dear reader? Yeah, that was yesterday. The unique act of handshaking isn’t really taxing on its own merit, all told, because it’s so seamless and expected. But when you couple this with a few hours of rattling the same introduction repeatedly, trying fruitlessly to vary your spiel by altering inflection here and there, it just gets to you, you know?
For all my talk of yakskin scarves and physiological dependencies on organic wheat, the artsy type has always been my favorite type. I’m drawn to the volatility, the fervor, the moodiness, the kind of honesty inaccessible under the cover of numbers and fixed definitions. This was my first portfolio show, and were it my coin I’d hire almost everyone I met. Certainly I saw some clunkers–work that would’ve abused your eyes, regardless of artistic background or pointedness of nose–but on the whole it was inspiring.
Man, you should’ve seen some of the “resumes” I collected. I have a feeling each exhibitor spent more on packaging than I do on groceries in any given month. There were times when I felt genuinely guilty for dispensing my card, so impressive was the talent. It was like, “Even though I’m being paid to put my contact info in your hand, I need you to throw it away immediately and save yourself.” Taste and Internet advertising? They seldom intersect at the same point, let alone the same plane.
Things look different from the other side, let me tell you. I remember fretting over the type of paper on which I would print my resume, grooming the zinger questions I would level to wow potential employers, carefully choosing between pomade or gel to augment the marketability of my hair, and generally adding to the collective neurosis of the student body. That’s the career fair for you, I guess–a flea market of ideas and the eager applicants who would embrace those ideas or, at the very least, endure them for a year or two.
Do you know what happened to the resumes I collected today? The good, the bad, the ones on 32-lb ivory paper, the few printed on bright whites stolen from public copiers? They’re sitting in a single pile on my desk, somewhere in the general vicinity between my monitor and my lunch napkin, and my fervent wish is that the cleaning staff won’t mistakenly toss the stack tonight.
In the end, I don’t believe employers give two shits and a tchotchke about the content of your mousse and, to a certain extent, even your qualifications. It’s the personality that remains with the resume. Sure, there’s a minimum level of competency required, but we’re talking about a job fair at Northwestern. It’s a carnival of competency, a poundhouse for careerists, where the overlooked question is whether we will find something we value intrinsically, rather than something we can just do.
Originally I wanted to paint the typology of job expo attendees for you–stoner, hot chick, leather portfolioso, that kind of thing–but my eyes are already closing. I must go downtown tomorrow. My colleague is familiar with the ways of art students, and she recommends I wear all black. I think I will make do with a hat braided from the wool of free-range yak.
This is the part where I say, “It’s fate.” During a company lunch today our boss waltzed into the room and, in a germane capstone to our week on all things aural, handed each of us an iPod nano. I’ve never owned Apple products, though I’ve heard they’re above the curve. The company is certainly beyond capitalizing product names fully, but I must say: the nano is indeed a thing of beauty.
You know how there are people who enjoy frequenting the places they left? Let me explain. In high school, for instance, you could count on a few graduates to attend a club meeting religiously, even though they were well into freshman or sophomore year in college. And then a similar thing happened in college, where alumni appeared with such regularity that you’d question whether they ever left. I’m not talking about visiting once or twice. I’m talking repeatedly.
I’ve been on campus multiple times in the past two months, and although the purpose of my returns is slightly excusable–to expel bright yellow posters upon every trafficked billboard–I still feel some of that stigma, some of the desperation. This coming week will be the crowning touch, with an overpriced career fair on Monday, followed by a harrowing downtown expedition on Tuesday, where my co-worker and I will wade through a potential flood of art students for hires. My highly trained recruiter’s eye tells me to find candidates who a) will eat at places other than Whole Foods and b) can comfortably write on paper they haven’t woven themselves.