Wednesday was the first day of Pharmacy Days. A bunch of employers set up booths and tried to attract some potential employees. Even though most of them are only interested in graduates, they can’t not be pestered by prepharm students wanting internships.
I was one of those. And it was only because Larry begged me to dress nice and attend with him so he wouldn’t look like an idiot because he’d be walking around all day wearing fancy clothes. So I met him halfway. I wore nice khakis that covertly passed as casual wear and kept a button-up shirt in a plastic bag in my backpack. A t-shirt completed the disguise.
When I do see Larry, lo and behold, he’s wearing a zip-up hoodie and jeans. Now who looks like the idiot, Larry?!! 谢谢 for that!!!
So as Larry and I head to the career fair in the Union building after lunch, I donning my dress shirt and him still wearing painfully informal wear and clutching resumés, I realize then that I left my resumés back in my room, on my flash drive, 3/4 of a mile away.
Fifty minutes later, I show up again, after having run to a bus stop, taken it partway, ran the rest, printed five resumés in the computer lab in the basement, and power walked back to the Union building with them under my arm.
I arrive, sweating, with resumés that, beside likely containing multiple typos, smell like armpit.
My mindset all along was that this was just an exploratory mission, in preparation for latter years. What I didn’t expect was all the free stuff. Some of it was to bait students, others contained numbers and other contact info. Some booths even had big piles of fun-size chocolate. (I then wondered about what kind of company would find a need to lure potential employees with candy.) When I went up to Kroger (thinking they were some faceless multinational corporate drug giant but learning that they were a regional supermarket giant), a man in a suit set a brown grocery bag at my feet filled with goodies like microwave noodles, Tostitos and oatmeal packets.
I passed out a couple of (probably) faulty resumés and learned a basic protocol for the whole process so I think I got something out of it (meaning experience mostly, not necessarily the two boxes of granola bars, though I got those too). I can’t say the same for Larry, who earned a death glare from his advisor for the green striped hoodie.