Today was the Technical Opportunities Conference (TOC), where technical employers come to the university looking for fresh meat.

What sucked about the TOC for me was having to explain my major to eight different employers. That's probably not a good sign... See, the thing is, the industry is badly in need of people in my major, but they don't know they need me.

Thank God I'm going to grad school.

But everyone knows that the real point of the TOC is to trade resumes for toys.

Here's what I hauled in today:

• A Mellon Bank mousepad. Thanks to my nifty optical mouse, I don't need mousepads, so this is largely worthless.

• A translucent purple pen. Score.

• A water bottle.

• A clear bouncy ball containing a circuit board and two LEDs which flash for about 15 seconds after you bounce the ball. This is a quality TOC toy. The company wasn't even looking for computer people - they were an engineering design company - but I wasn't leaving the TOC without a first-tier toy.

• Perhaps the highlight of this year's resume-toy swap: a tin full of peppermints. The top of the tin is sort of like one of those bottle cap safety seals, where it pops in and out; to open the tin, you pop it in, and the edges release, and to close it, you push the edges in, which pops it in. Benefits of this toy are fourfold: free peppermints; the lid mechanism is really cool; Jenn is looking for tins to arts-and-craftsify; and the company is not only based in Pittsburgh, they actually knew what HCI was! They even knew the abbreviation!

I could have had more - a t-shirt, a frisbee, a coffee mug - but I had to carry all the stuff around, plus still be able to shake hands and pull resumes out of my folder to hand to people.