E-Week and Business Week offer students a wide variety of activities with undeniable benefits. There’s free food, golf, a charity dance and all kinds of other stuff to do with the intention of bringing you closer to your classmates.

However, this week of festivity should not be mistaken for a “fall Veishea.” These events are not planned to help you round out your social calendar and they should not be viewed as such.

Free food, golf, ice skating and a dance are all fun things to do this week, but engineers and businessmen should be using this week as a time to look forward. College is great, but it’s never to early to start looking ahead. Nobody wants to be broke and unemployed the day after they graduate.

Utilize this week to make those difficult decisions and elusive connections while there’s no crushing time constraints, and take solace in knowing thousands of other Cyclones from dozens of majors will be undertaking the same frustrating process. We’re all in this together, and staring down the road of life is a little less daunting with your friends and advisers looking on with you.

This week there are countless opportunities to tweak your resume, have your cover letter reviewed, network with influential alumni, talk to recruiters and plan for the post-college life. Use them!

Do not assume you know everything, and do not hesitate to ask someone older, wiser and salary-earning to help you succeed. This even includes freshmen … who should create a resume, attend the career fair, talk to recruiters and start narrowing their interests now. If every student does this, the stressful, panicked, haphazard blitzkrieg through Career Management Service the night before the career fair will be a thing of the past.

This may all seem a little heavy considering most students don’t bother to plan dinner more than five minutes in advance, but that lack of individual planning is precisely what makes this week so valuable. It is a specific week set aside each and every year that promotes, and sometimes obligates, planning among the campus community.

So go snag a free meal (or five), have fun golfing and dancing, but take a little time each day to tweak your resume, talk to your adviser, send an e-mail, fill out an application and make sure your schedule is free the day of the career fair. In an economy riddled with uncertainty, the difference between an “iJob” and a “McJob” could be decisions and connections made now.