Ah, finally relief!! The deadline was reached last night and that should be the end of resume headaches unless there are a truckload of companies that want us to fill their own forms. No God let's please not have anything like that...it's just too painful.
When they said 4 weeks to develop your resume I scoffed and said what the hell how much time does it take. Now that it is finally over, I know. Ten versions and lots of snipping and cutting later I know what "growth of resume" means.
Resumes are good and bad. Good because they let you know yourself more. It does involve a lot of soul searching and memory scratching and one does get to recollect a lot of good times all over again. It's bad however cause after a time you get sick of achievements and wish for the simplicity of things. Because of its competitive nature and the fact that one has to make an impression in under 20 seconds, everything suddenly gets hyped up. Action verbs - that's the key even though there might be no action at all. You claim credit for everything that has possibly happened and there is general aggrandizement. By then resumes become verbose and sickly like saccharine sweetness. Things are cramped because you have too many things to write from and can't choose what to leave out else you decide to increase font size and liberally add spaces because you have not much to write about (all in the name of better readability as in my case :)) And believe me the more you think about your resume the more points you will remember, infinite corrections to be made and it's like the proof reading will never end. Frankly, the best way to write a resume is to catch hold of 15-20 resumes from the previous year similar to your profile and just cut, copy and paste.
And then there's beloved html to drive us all crazy. Mine got done thanks to Zubin's fundaes and Surd jugaadofying some old resumes. After that it was just cut, copy, paste (Cut, copy, paste - every IITians mantra that mostly never fails). To make things more complicated resume headers keep changing every few hours right up to the last day. So you never know whether you have written too much or too little. Anyways am done with it so relieved. It's now the placement nom's headache of checking every single resume. Am I glad I am not one - so many resumes...yechhh!!! (But then again resumes make interesting reading especially when you know the guy has made a mountain of a mole hill)
Anyways one last comment they should just stick to one pagers for non tech and 2 pagers for tech. It will at least cut down on the unnecessary faff that people write especially about their positions of responsibility and academic projects. The tech guys can mention all the projects they want in the two pagers. That way everyone should be happy.
But now I no longer am bothered (hopefully) though I still have to work on making my academic projects and internships real for the interviews. Oh what a pain...
