Billboards in Fantasyland

It takes a lot to catch a busy student's eye, and campus posters are a remarkable testament to the fickle passions of the student spirit. Some posters, usually ads for sketchy shared apartments ("Seeking female roommate who loves rottweilers"), psychological experiments ("Are you manic-depressive?") or surveys at the Dental School ("Free Root Canal!") tend to stay up for decades. Others have half-lives around 40 minutes, like advertisements for the endless stream of speeches given by political has-beens, or the even more endless stream of a cappella jams with names that never get old--including "Jambidextrous," "Jambivalent," "Jamnesia," "Jamaica," "Jamputation," "Jamphetamines," "Jamniocentesis," "Jammonium Hydroxide" or "J&" (Jampersand, in case you didn't get it). Campus posters are something like little slices of Harvard life, not just because of the events they advertise, but also because of how they try to get our attention. If you are one of those mysterious poster-trolls who traverse the Yard at dawn to wallpaper it with your fluorescent dreams--tearing down competing posters in the process, of course, you inconsiderate fiends--you know that campus posters succeed best when they prey on our fantasies. No one wants to read about the Kendo Club. But if your poster says, "FREE HOT PHONE SEX...come to the Kendo Club," someone will read it. This principle never fails.

But yesterday at the front door to Eliot House, something entirely new had burst onto the campus poster scene. Disguising itself as an ordinary poster, the blinding orange flier nearly blended in with all of the "Take Back the Night" posters until its bold, screaming words came into full view: "RESUME CONTEST."

The terms alone are shocking in their normalcy. Resume. Contest. Both are words that you'd expect to see on a poster, maybe even on the same poster, as in "To enter the Third Annual Edible Pre-Frosh Contest, send your resume to University Hall." Or "Prepare to witness a blood-chilling contest as the Women's Ping-Pong Team and their Princeton rivals resume their bloody battle of balls." But a resume contest?

Without even resorting to crude sexual innuendo, the poster earns itself a closer look. And once more, the poster delivers. "Are you a senior looking for a JOB?" it screams. "Are you a sophomore or a junior looking for a SUMMER INTERNSHIP?" (Notice that these categories apply to an overwhelming majority of students.) "Then enter the 1st annual Harvard Resume Contest! Contest judges are looking for well-rounded resumes. Your G.P.A. is not required."

And here one of the most common Harvard fantasies, though one rarely so explicitly exploited, emerges. (Or, shall we say, resumes.) Harvard students became Harvard students via a nationwide resume contest that all of us won. But now that we need to go through the process of finding a "JOB" or a "SUMMER INTERNSHIP," we secretly wish that this whole business would just take care of itself--no irritating cover letters, no nerve-wracking interviews, just drop the thing in the mail and be done with it--we're good enough, aren't we? And here, suddenly, on the bulletin board in Eliot House, someone seems willing to fulfill that fantasy--just like the Kendo Club was willing to offer us free hot phone sex! Ingenious indeed. We read on.

So what is the glorious Resume Contest award? A plum position at a fancy New York firm? A paid political vacation in Washington, D.C.? "Three winners," the flier promises, "one from each year, will receive a $50.00 prize!" Here our hearts sink. After all, it was merely months ago that certain companies, running their own private resume contests, were offering a $50,000 prize. (The superfluous zeroes on the poster are part of the tease.) And then we get to the fine print: "As part of a larger research project on career choices by organizational researchers, a resume contest will be held from April 23 to April 28." (Yes, that means you can't play anymore.)

Yet the fantasy persists. Even if it's "only" a $50 prize, this contest appears to differ drastically from those run by various companies in one very important way. For those resume contests, we had to use real resumes. But here, it would seem, one may not only edit and amplify, but entirely refashion oneself, creating a new identity for the contest alone. Tired of your dull laundry list of menial work-study jobs with inflated titles? Just turn yourself into John Adams, Class of 1755: "Built foundation of new government to alter national consciousness." Or Henry David Thoreau, Class of 1837: "Built and inhabited isolated cabin to alter national consciousness." Or Theodore J. Kaczynski '62: "Built and inhabited isolated cabin to alter national consciousness." You can discover a new element, build a nuclear reactor out of Tinker Toys, or save children from burning buildings on alternate Thursdays. The sky's the limit--well, the sky, and the automatic bullet-formatting of your version of Microsoft Word.

Alas--or, might we say, "Jamnation!"--the Resume Contest offers about as much wish-fulfillment as the Kendo Club offers lewd entertainment. The poster directs interested students to a Web site, where the whole thing turns out to be a disappointingly harmless psychological test. Yet there remains something eerie about it, perhaps even more so after it becomes clear that the whole thing comes no closer to fulfilling our fantasies than the promises of free hot phone sex. Psychological researchers presumably designed this poster in order to capture our attention, and the method they devised to do so was to appeal to a trait that we are even more ashamed of than greed or even lust. They tried to appeal to something entirely different: our arrogance. And in a place where they had to compete with thousands of other fluorescent fliers, they were aware that this was enough. For any Harvard student with a moral resume under his or her belt, and that's actually most of us, the fact that this might work is a little hard to stomach.

However, there is heartening news to report from the land of the Resume Contest. Of the dozens of posters cluttering the entrance to Eliot House, many, including the Resume Contest poster, have little tabs cut out on the ends so that interested parties can tear off a phone number or e-mail address. While students had torn off the contact information for everything from yard sales to martial arts performances, as of yesterday, one lone poster's tabs remained entirely pristine and untouched: the Resume Contest's. In the land of competing fluorescent fantasies, no one was interested. Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column will resume in reading period.