Don't call us, we'll call you

It's resumé time. Again. The Career Fair has come and gone, and it's time to begin the daily review of the companies hawking themselves through on-line campus recruiting. Being that the resumé is the first glimpse those companies get of a prospective employee, it's a good idea to spend time on a well-crafted resumé.

But time is a valuable commodity for most people, and college students are hardly an exception. So plenty of opportunists have come to fill the gap with services or computer programs to help manage the resume chore.

Some good samaritan randomly dropped off one of those programs in the Recess mailbox one day. It had a wittily rhymed title: WinWay Resumé. No mere resumé writing program, it promised to be "the easiest and most complete job-winning system."

The program proved simple enough to use and came with a handy autosave and recovery feature-apparently included because the program crashes so frequently. I took my boring, old-fashioned resumé written in MS Word, and inputted the data. WinWay Resumé helpfully generated a new and improved resumé that, for all intents and purposes, looked nearly identical to mine. So much for originality.

For those looking for a little more flair, there are 19 other templates included ranging from colorful to avant-garde. Some are downright odd, others don't look too bad aesthetically. But either way, with a little more effort and a decent knowledge of Word or Publisher, you can crank out the same results and customize away the lingering ugliness.

But the most interesting feature of WinWay Resumé is the database of 100,000 phrases to use in your resumé and computer-generated cover letters. There is a virtually endless supply of hackneyed phrases with combinations of "" and "" prompting-like Mad Libs-for personal information.

And of course there are calendars, contact lists and videos with acting school dropouts painfully demonstrating interviewing techniques. But there is little here that couldn't be accomplished with an inexpensive personal organizer or wall calendar, a few trips to the Career Development Center and a little hard work on a favorite word processor.

The product could be helpful to a cynical applicant hoping to play the numbers with a well-padded resumé in the hope of getting a highly paid job with as little effort as possible-hardly the Duke student mentality.