How Not to Get Shortlisted

What steps did you follow in deciding which XXXXXXXXXX firms to apply to?

I opened the list of companies visiting campus for summer placement and related my CV to all of them. But that’s just twenty words and I have to stretch this to ninety somehow, so let’s pretend there was deep thought and profound logic involved. I analyzed my strengths and weaknesses – nope, sorry, I’m not supposed to mention my weaknesses here – my strengths and skills relevant to the XXXXXXXXXX industry to arrive at this vital decision. That’s seventy-five words, and this sentence brings it to ninety, so here ends the story.

Why would you like to intern with AAAAA?

Let’s get one thing straight. I would not like to intern with anybody. I would like to spend next summer lounging on a sunny beach with a book, preferably in Majorca. But that would mean a long and arduous fight with the PGP office – not something a girl in her right mind would undertake.
So that’s why I want AAAAA; I have no information about whether AAAAA wants me. If they do I hope they will tell me so immediately; I can then stop distorting the truth six times daily.

What made you choose the BBBBBB position in the firm?

Does it matter? It’s just two months; nothing you do to me could possibly be more taxing than the first term at IIMA. Since you’re asking, though, it was eighth on the list and eight was listed as my lucky number today. Don’t ask me where. I’m sure it was somewhere.
Being of sound body and allegedly sound mind, I can guarantee that I will not set the building on fire. There’s no other damage I can do in eight weeks, so it’s not such a dusty proposition. I hope.

Discuss your Extra-Curricular Activities and Interests.

I doubt cursing myself for not keeping every certificate I ever won (I should have hyphenated that to save words) counts, so let’s stick with the usual… books literature drama poetry math. It would have been maths but for Microsoft Word. I have wasted enough time clicking “Ignore” to be willing to concede the point.
Something missing? Oh, yeah, proof that I’m not lying through my teeth because I think it matters to recruiters that I won a prize for reciting “Jack and Jill” at the age of three.
Er.

Not the best way to get a job offer, I concede, unless there are points for originality.

My Kingdom for a Verse

I haven't a kingdom, though. It's as easy to offer endless expanses of gold-bearing soil as it is to offer a square foot of barren and parched earth on the other side of nowhere if you have neither.

I'd very much like to say I would give anything, even unto half my kingdom, to anyone who can tell me the rest of this or even put a name to the "Anonymous" that I ought to stick in at the end of it:

A single word, a single page,
The remnants of a distant age;
Fair breezes touch a greener lea,
A brighter sun, a bluer sea –
Naught left to us but poetry.

But that wouldn't be fair when I possess as many kingdoms as I do kings to go with them.

Excuse the rambling. It's been a hectic week so far... Again with the CVs, the Statements of Purpose (beyond, "not flunking out of the course"), the assignments, the sundry other things that seem too minor to mention but somehow fill every free second of your day.

Need I even mention that there are now less than three weeks to midterms? It's become a fact of my life that there are eternally less than three weeks to something. Deadlines... you just have to love them. Or at least tolerate them, since whether or not you like it they're here to stay.

Because if the young Lord Paris goes before you, you really have no option but to follow.

How to Travel

With a salmon.

Umberto Eco should have written a book on how to spend a Sunday. I'm surprised that there have not been any particularly famous polls on the subject. They would probably turn up enough unexpected results to merit an inch or so on the front page of the Times of India.

I can guess what some of them would be... Lie in bed with a book... Loll on a sandy beach under a tropical/Mediterranean sun... Watch TV... Watch a movie... Play online chess against somebody in Honolulu...

OK, that last one is stretching it a bit. You get my point, though... The things that would feature high on the list would definitely not include, for instance, writing a paper about how reading four lines from Pygmalion filled one with the knowledge of how to be a better and more effective manager. A very edifying way to spend the holiday, no doubt, but not a particularly entertaining one.

With due apologies to HH Munro and Clovis Sangrail, what is needed at this moment is an Unrest Cure. I am now legally old enough to stand for a by-election in some out-of-the-way constituency, but somehow I do not believe that is quite the answer.

And whatever quiz there is tomorrow will certainly prove unrestful enough for anybody, up to and including Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, Fifth Earl of Ickenham, so I guess that's taken care of.

She Walks in Beauty

Three handsome aristocrats at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that was the end of any stereotype that ever existed of a poet as a tiny, sorry-looking specimen of humanity who used vicarious verse (which has an odd sound to it despite the alliteration, I know, but bear with me) to make up for the total lack of romanticism in his life. Nobody can accuse Byron of being boring any more than they can accuse him of wasting too much time polishing his poetry.

I tried to pick my personal favourite of his poems, but it was rather difficult. I can only name the ones that wouldn't figure: All is Vanity, Farewell! If Ever Fondest Prayer and When We Two Parted. It is not that I love Caesar less, but that I love Rome more... and I am now lost somewhere on the cobbled streets, and the day I can make up my mind where to go will be the day Wile E. Coyote turns vegan.

Well, it might happen.

On a slightly less illogical note, I think it would be a toss-up between Maid of Athens, The Isles of Greece and By the Rivers of Babylon, with The Destruction of the Sennacherib coming much higher on the list of Honourable Mentions than, I dare guess, most people would place it. Technically, I suppose, it is simply an exalted example of the misuse of metre, but it's the kind of thing that gives the impression that Byron himself had a very good time writing it.

One day, as I keep telling myself, I will know which I like best, whether the refrigerator light really goes off when you shut the door, the name of the person who commissioned the assassination of Philip of Macedon, and the exact value of pi. Until that day comes... There is, however little I like admitting it to myself, work to be done.