I never thought I’d be able to make people jealous by telling them I spent my spring break in Kansas City and Minneapolis. But what better way to spend your week off than watching your basketball teams say “We’re better than you” to the rest to the country.

Even my dad is catching Cyclone fever and he surprised me with a pair of tickets to the men’s first and second round games at the Metrodome. With games being held in the Metrodome, the tickets were great because they were close to my home in Bloomington, Minn.

My upper-deck seats gave me a unique “bird’s-eye-view” of the court below from the perspective of a bird who had been rocketed into space and forced to watch the game through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. From what I saw on SportsCenter, the Cyclones played well.

Following the Cyclones last week forced me to alter my original spring break plans of setting a new personal record for time spent motionless on a couch. With that goal unattainable, I decided to spend the three days between Big 12 and NCAA tournaments finding an internship, since I need one this summer if I want to graduate.

Personally, I think an internship requirement is unfair. If I want to pay this school tens of thousands of dollars so I can walk out of here without any practical skills or experience, isn’t that my right?

But I’ve never been one to stand up to The Man (or even my little sister), so I went ahead with the job search. One of my roommates, Schwake, was also in need of a job, so we decided to pool our job finding resources.

Together we devised a simple, two-part plan for landing great jobs: 1) Wait for the phone to ring with lucrative job offers. 2) Answer phone.

Under this plan, the first two days of our job search consisted primarily of junk food, digital cable, and Schwake humiliating me in every video game known to man, or at least in the two that we own.

But the phone never rang. After two days of this approach we decided to take a more proactive approach to earning a living, so Schwake bought a Powerball ticket and went to bed. I decided to head up to Minnesota a day before the tournament to see if I might have better luck finding an internship up there.

Thanks to the new gas prices, the trip up to Minnesota almost broke me financially. So for the trip back to Iowa, I traded in my gas-guzzling station wagon for a prehistoric, yet fuel efficient Flintstone-style car.

Instead of a motor, these cars just have a hole in the floor that enables the driver to actually pick up the entire car and run with it to get it going. These cars are especially effective for going down hills which, unfortunately, don’t exist in Iowa.

Another feature of Flintstone-style driving is that the scenery along I-35 suddenly becomes a continuous loop of the same three houses over and over again, which is fine because normally there isn’t anything along I-35.

While I was in Minneapolis, I decided to spend some time calling advertising agencies to beg for a job. But getting a hold of people at these places wasn’t as easy as I thought.

Advertising is a very vacation intensive business. Ad executives must juggle their time between planning vacations, going on vacations and recovering from vacations. This leaves very little time for actual business, but good ad executives still devote a few hours each day to golfing and eating at expensive restaurants with their clients’ money.

The only people you will ever talk to at an ad agency are the receptionists who are bitter people because they don’t get to go on the vacations with everyone else. They may offer to let you leave leave a message on a voice mail, which is just a trick to get you to go away.

So, I really haven’t talked to anyone and will probably wind up spending my summer shoveling asphalt again. But in the rare chance that you are trying to get a job and actually do talk to someone, here are some helpful tips.

A cover letter is very important because this is where you make your first impression. It should be clear, concise and say something about you. I used the letter P.

Your resume is not as important. The people reading resumes are either old and partially blind or young and just don’t care. Just use small type and cram in as many words as you can.

Nobody will want to put in the effort to actually read it, so as long as you print it on that cool “marbleized” paper you’re guaranteed to get an interview.

Going into an interview requires a lot of preparation. “From talking with you and looking at your resume printed on this cool ‘marbleized’ paper, you seem to be just the kind of man this company needs. So congratulations, you got the job! That’s what I’d be saying to you if we hadn’t filled the position last week. We’ll keep your resume on file.”

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Peter Borchers is a senior in advertising from Bloomington, Minn.