Prepoceros

So let’s say you’re applying to law school. You’ll need a resume. With a good deal of help from your computer-smart boyfriend you rework your ugly, outdated resume into one that looks presentable and is tailored for law school admission.

You’re using a language specially designed for typesetting because it produces fantastic, professional-looking documents. The law schools’ computers won’t understand this language, but you can render your finished resume in the handy Portable Document Format (PDF), so named because it allows users to transmit documents reliably between computers. Pretty much anyone can open a pdf file, and the documents look the same on any system, so it’s a great choice for a document with a lot of formatting that needs to be just so—a resume, for instance*.

But when you go to upload your resume to the application website (at, um, 10:58), you are surprised to find that the system won’t accept a pdf. What WILL it accept, then? Well, doc, txt, rtf, and wp files, basically. Why does it only accept these file types? Because those are the ones it can convert to pdf to send along to the law schools. Why does it convert them to pdf? Because pdf is a reliable way to transmit documents between computers.

So all your paperwork needs to be in pdf because that’s the way the colleges want to download it, but you are not allowed to SUBMIT anything in pdf. You have to submit it as some other file type and let their mystery program do whatever it wants with your formatting.

Shocked, you throw several expletives in the LSAC’s direction, then sit down to recreate your entire resume as a Word document. It takes you an hour, and it looks like crap.

You pull all your hair out, then go to bed with a headache from the stress and eyestrain of staring at your stupid resume. Next time you will start earlier.

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* Yes, I know you’ve heard of a pdf before. I’m making a point; bear with me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 2:20 pm and is filed under miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.