I’ve been in college for a little less than a full semester and already I know that the most frequent line I’m destined to hear in my upcoming years in college is “It will look good on your resume.” Ahh. Yes. Of course. The all important resume.You are undoubtedly a slave to your resume. No matter how good looking you are you will still be secondary in importance compared to how impressive your resume is. As sad as how significant a piece of paper with a list of accomplishments is, we must still nonetheless abide by the omnipresent rules of the working world as we are now officially its’ tools. Just kidding, of course. But then again even if I’m kidding it doesn’t mean that its not true. The workshop on Teusday, led by a young woman from STARR, was intended to instill into our minds early on the importance of remaining competitive in the workforce by enhancing our resumes to our fullest capacities. And if we failed to do so…well then good luck with that. The woman attempted to outline the basic structure of a typical resume minus a projector to aide her, which was all at once a commendable feat but also detrimental to the overall success of her presentation. The material she covered detailing the bare essentials needing to be included in a resume was both generic and rudimentary. Most students, even the most inexperienced ones, would be able to pick up that type of information given its’ enormous accessibility. The lack of communication between speaker and audience only further undermined the importance and usefulness of the facts and advice being handed out that day. However, I still applaud the speaker’s efforts for attempting to reach across a seemingly indifferent audience without any form of assistance, even though she seemed to come across as overly aggressive at times in her manner of speaking. But I guess being overly persistant gets your message across at certain times. Attending these types of workshops has the potential of filling one with a sense of both anxiety and drive. While it forces you to contemplate your future prospects–When will I get that next internship? or What if I can’t manage that perfect 4.0 GPA–it also puts you into a competitive mindset propelling you towards reaching both your academic and professional goals. Eventually, that resume will be a summation of these achievements. Ultimately, of course these lists of accomplishments are not the be all or end all of who you are. They are not an evaluation of your self-worth. Even after attaining an internal audit internship at KPMG or a leadership position in the student government you are inevitably the same person. Your external accomplishments in no way signify personal progress and whatever emotional growth that you might have undergone beneath the surface can not be objectively displayed on a resume. This is a simply way of exemplifying the ever important realization that the working world does not care about who you are but what you can do for them. It’s a nauseating reality.