A college education — it prepares you for the life ahead. It provides you with an invaluable skill set, can lead to amazing opportunities to make a real change in the world and helps springboard you into the world of internships, jobs and even careers. At Stanford this springboard is the Career Development Center (CDC), and, in our digital age, the most frequented of their resources is the online job database. Instead of accelerating our leap forward, however, the CDC’s oft-impenetrable Web resource often leaves us flat-footed.

The formatting of the Web site’s software is lacking. When searching for jobs and internships, students usually have limiting criteria in mind — they know what field they might like, cities where they might want to live, the names of a few companies they find interesting. The CDC Web site, however, does not allow students to pursue positions using these filters. The Advanced Search function does allow searches under Job Function, but it only narrows what kind of work you’d like. It does not allow searches by firm or business and its geographic breakdowns are only by state or country. The Advanced Search function also provides a host of completely superfluous search agents. Do you care if the search is for Cardinal Recruiting Interviews or Career Fair Postings? Do you want a job that requires less than 40 percent travel? Be as precise as you want because you can choose the amount of travel you’d endure to within 10 percent increments.

If you become tired with the search agents, there’s always the Keywords search. Quite astonishingly, however, the more specific your search, the more hits you get — if you were to type in “sales” you would find fewer jobs than if you were to type in “sales manager.” The Web site manages to return all postings that have the word “sales” in them and all the postings that have “manager” in them, instead of, more intuitively, returning only those postings that have both “sales” and “manager.” For those who know exactly what job they want to search for and find on the CDC Web site, this particular characteristic can be frustrating.

The software company that supports Stanford’s CDC Web site and many other career Web sites around the country is, rather ironically, called Symplicity. While their homepage is a decently formatted Web site and their short list of clients is rather impressive, students around the country could have a much more beneficial recruiting experience. One of Symplicity’s self-professed comparative advantages is its focus on clients — the company promises to provide on-going personalized support. As clients, we are asking for this personalized support, along with some major improvements to the product.

Perhaps Stanford’s own Computer Science department, which has produced some of the best software developers in the nation, could help refocus and rebuild the CDC’s on-line job searching tools. Stanford’s CourseRank Web site is a wonderfully easy to use online resource and is a vast improvement upon the previous online resources students used to search for courses. As spring quarter looms and seniors start to plan for the future, there is no better time to pay attention to our career Web site and to make needed improvements.