I started working on my first resume the fall semester of my senior year at college. I was in a senior seminar class at the time and one of my assignments was to create a resume and give it to my adviser so she could have it on file.

When I began the task of creating my first resume, I had no idea how to tackle the assignment.

It was finally recommended that I visit the career services department at school to see if anyone could help me.

Once I found out I had to visit the department, I was a little nervous.

The head of the department was not exactly the most together person I have ever met and I was supposed to trust him with something as important as my resume?

I first met the career services guy my junior year when he was the adviser for my internship.

The internship lasted the entire semester, but he only talked to me once to check on my progress. Then I had a hard time getting him to turn in all of my paperwork on time so I could get the credit for the internship.

Also, a few weeks after I had completed the internship, he e-mailed me asking if I needed a job because he had found one at a newspaper and thought I would be interested in it.

It actually sounded like an interesting job; the only problem was they wanted someone who had graduated already

and I still had one year of college left.

The guy was supposed to be my adviser for an entire semester for an internship and he couldn’t even remember if I had graduated or not!

Needless to say, I was not impressed by his help.

Grudgingly I made my way to the guy’s office and asked him about creating a resume.

The school actually had a computer program that helped people make their resumes.

The program had templates to work with, so it was fairly simple to plug in all of my information and be confident that it was in the right format.

Although the program made the task of creating my resume fairly simple, I still felt uneasy with the whole experience.

I called one of my good friends, who had already graduated, and explained to her how I was feeling.

We finally decided it wasn’t the resume that was making me stress out; it was the idea of a resume.

In other words, if I was making a resume, then I was preparing to enter the workforce sometime in the near future.

And that is a scary thought for a 21- year- old college student.

After my friend calmed me down and assured me that I was normal and it was going to be okay, I finally got into writing my resume.

Once I finished my resume, I took it to one of my favorite professors because I knew he could help me edit it and make it acceptable. He helped me and I fixed the errors.

Since then, I have tweaked my resume and added other activities to it.

I still think the whole process of writing a resume is an interesting one.

One of my friends was in a senior seminar class and they discussed resumes.

The professor told him that sometimes employers don’t even look at resumes.

He also mentioned that a lot of times getting a job is about who you know and not what you know.

That was pretty discouraging to me.

The other day I was talking to another one of my friends who was working on his resume.

He was trying to come up with a synonym for the word “strong,” to describe his communication skills.

I racked my brain trying to think of another word that would work.

I even searched for my thesaurus, which was stuffed in a box with all of my other books.

Although I looked for a better word, I just couldn’t think of one.

After awhile, he decided to leave the word like it was.

A little while later I read the listing for the job he was applying for and they described what they wanted in an employee. And do you want to know what word they used?

They used “good.” All of that searching for the perfect word and something as simple as “good” would have worked!

At that moment I realized that resume writing is a crazy Russian Roulette type process. I mean, who truly knows what an employer wants?

All you can do is create your resume and hope for the best.

I would like to encourage all of those job hunters out there not to give up.

Keep writing those resumes and banging on those employers’ doors.

Somewhere out there your dream job is waiting for you.