Being that I am incredibly poor and even more incredibly unemployed, I thought that Cornell students could benefit from some of my job-seeking wisdom. I will not make any illegitimate claims to job-hunting greatness, but let me just say that I have worked summers at a guitar store. Impressive, no?

The first thing that any good-to-great career counselor will tell you is that you’re going to need a great resume. And any great resume is going to start out with a great objective. For this step, it will be sufficient to reword the phrase, “please employ me so that I can pay my loans,” in as flowery a way as your sense of morality allows you.

Once you have your objective outlined and spell-checked, I would like to congratulate you: You are nowhere near getting a job. Sorry, but you’re still as worthless to society as the next guy who’s unemployed. You burden on the system, you.

So clearly, just having an objective isn’t enough. You also need to list your work experience, your hobbies and pastimes, and your GPA. Unlike the objective part of your resume, your GPA is actually entirely subjective. Be whimsical. Employers love to see some eccentricity and there is truly no better way to demonstrate this than by inflating your GPA.

But no greater than .4 points, because modern social convention calls that taboo. Maybe one day we’ll be able to reform this arcane practice. If our new president really wants employment rates to go up then he will have to recognize that it’s not a stimulus package that we need, it’s an abolishment of background checks.

Although your GPA is going to get you through the door, it’s your work experience that’s going to put you, as they say in the business world, over the top. No matter what job you are applying for, you should “monetize” your work experience. Did you work at a cancer lab for three summers straight? You think you’re going to get away with putting “data analysis for cancer studies” on your resume? Unless you’re using some kind of magical tool (as in, not CareerNet) which lets you apply for non-finance related jobs, you’re going to have to change that to “developed cancer solutions.”

Even still, this will not be enough for advanced job-seekers. If you fall into this category you will want to, after monetizing your resume, do the next logical thing and “bankify” it. Here you will change “developed cancer solutions” to “worked on 250 deals with a 2.5 sigma value.” Technically, if you replace “deals” with “people” and “2.5 sigma value” with blank space, you will not have lied. This is beyond legitimate behavior for a job seeker, and it is smiled upon.

The advice above is going to put you over the top, but, as they say in the business world, you won’t have broken through the glass unemployment ceiling quite yet. If you are lucky enough to get an interview, first of all, let me just say, screw you. Second off, you’re going to have to start preparing for it. Basically, what it comes down to is that you’re going to have to find someone who is a much better speaker than you are and ask them to do the interview for you. This is especially easy for a phone interview, as you won’t even have to get someone who looks like you. Many books have been written about how to find someone suitable enough to double for you at an interview, so I will not repeat what should by now be pretty much common knowledge. Just know that employers care very much about your skills in finding this person, and they will judge you accordingly.

Luckily, if you go to an Ivy League school you can avoid all the steps above and leverage your superiority as a person for a job. This process is called networking. There are two ways to accomplish this. The first is by cold calling Cornell alumni and hoping that they will help you get a job because that’s how they got theirs in the first place. The second is by playing beer pong with their kids. This way is usually more fruitful, as employers have come to recognize that being wasted is a vital job skill — because, for example, you will often be wasted when talking to clients. Usually, to test if you can hold down your liquor, employers will force you to drink at an interview, to judge your maximum level of mental impairment. This is why you should always — always! — demand straight up whiskey when the receptionist asks if you’d like to have anything to drink. Orange juice is a rookie mistake. If you have already played beer pong with their kids you will be saving them time, because they will know that you are at least capable of applying for jobs while totally smashed.

Although these tips will undoubtedly get you a job when employment levels are normal, I am not sure if they will help you now. You might have to change your career plans. For example, recently I got an e-mail from Cornell Career Services recommending gap year opportunities. What follows is the only non-facetious sentence on this entire page: one of the opportunities was to work on a cruise ship for a year, say, washing dishes.

It’s good to be back, Cornell. And by the looks of it, I’m here to stay.