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Early-Career Application Letters
In the preceding, you've seen some rather impressive application letters. But what if you don't have all that experience—how do you construct a respectable
application letter?
Cite relevant projects (both in academia and community) you've worked on, even if they are not exactly related to the career that you pursue.
Spend extra time describing college courses and programs you have been involved in. What about team projects, research projects, or reports?
Include volunteer work that has had any trace of technical in it. (If you've not done any volunteer work, get to volunteering!)
List any organizations you have been a member of and describe any of their activities that have any trace of technical in them. (If you've not belonged to
any technically oriented organizations, get to belonging!)
As with the resume, you can use formatting to spread what information you have to fill out the resume page.
In the example student application letter below, notice that the writer describes his coursework and the applications that he used. His reference to a professional
exposition shows an active interest in a particular technical area. Moreover, his visit with an employee of the company with which he seeks employment is a
crafty form of name dropping. In general, the letter expresses enthusiasm about working in the VLSI area.
Early-career application letter. Use the strategies suggested here to fill your letter with good specific information.
Checklist of Common Problems in Application Letters
Readability and white space—Are there any dense paragraphs over 8 lines? Are there comfortable 1-inch to 1.5-inch margins all the way around the
letter? Is there adequate spacing between paragraphs and between the components of the letter?
Page fill—Is the letter placed on the page nicely: not crammed at the top one-half of the page; not spilling over to a second page by only three or four
lines?
General neatness, professional-looking quality—Is the letter on good quality paper, and is the copy clean and free of smudges and erasures?
Proper use of the business-letter format—Have you set up the letter in one of the standard business-letter formats? (See the references earlier in this
chapter.)
Overt, direct indication of the connection between your background and the requirements of the job—Do you emphasize this connection?
A good upbeat, positive tone—Is the tone of your letter bright and positive? Does it avoid sounding overly aggressive, brash, over-confident (unless
that is really the tone you want)? Does your letter avoid the opposite problem of sounding stiff, overly reserved, stand-offish, blasé, indifferent?
A good introduction—Does your introduction establish the purpose of the letter? Does it avoid diving directly into the details of your work and
educational experience? Do you present one little compelling detail about yourself that will cause the reader to want to keep reading?
A good balance between brevity and details—Does your letter avoid becoming too detailed (making readers less inclined to read thoroughly)? Does
your letter avoid the opposite extreme of being so general that it could refer to practically anybody?
Lots of specifics (dates, numbers, names, etc.)—Does your letter present plenty of specific detail but without making the letter too densely detailed?
Do you present hard factual detail (numbers, dates, proper names) that make you stand out as an individual?
A minimum of information that is simply your opinion of yourself—Do you avoid over-reliance on information that is simply your opinions about
yourself? For example, instead of saying that you "work well with others," do you cite work experience that proves that fact but without actually stating it?
Grammar, spelling, usage—And of course, does your letter use correct grammar, usage, and spelling?
Resumes
A resume is a selective record of your background—your educational, military, and work experience, your certifications, abilities, and so on. You send it,
sometimes accompanied by an application letter, to potential employers when you are seeking job interviews.
A resume should be easily readable, effectively designed, and adapted to audience expectations. If you are taking a technical writing course, your instructor
may be okay with your making up a few details in your resume to represent what you'll be when you graduate. However, if you're just starting your college
education and have little work experience, why not try using the techniques and suggestions here to create a resume that represents your current skills, abilities,
and background? Developing a decent-looking resume based on what you are now is a challenge that you have to deal with at some point—so why not now?
Resume Design: An Overview
Before personal computers, people used one resume for varied kinds of employment searches. However, with less expensive desktop publishing and high-
quality printing, people sometimes rewrite their resumes for every new job they go after. For example, a person who seeks employment both with a community
college and with a software-development company would use two different resumes. The contents of the two might be roughly the same, but the organization,
format, and emphases would be quite different.
You are probably aware of resume-writing software: you feed your data into them and they churn out a prefab resume. You probably also know about resume-
writing services that will create your resume for you for a hundred dollars or so. If you are in a time bind or if you are extremely insecure about your writing or
resume-designing skills, these services might help. But often they take your information and put it into a computer database that then force it into a prefab
structure. They often use the same resume-writing software just mentioned; they charge you about what the software costs. The problem is that these agencies
simply cannot be that sensitive or perceptive about your background or your employment search. Nor are you likely to want to pay for their services every month
or so when you are in the thick of a job search. Why not learn the skills and techniques of writing your own resume here, save the money, and write better
resumes anyway?
There is no one right way to write a resume. Every person's background, employment needs, and career objectives are different, thus necessitating unique
resume designs. Every detail, every aspect of your resume must start with who you are, what your background is, what the potential employer is looking for, and
what your employment goals are—not with from some prefab design. Therefore, use this chapter to design your own resume, browse through the various
formats, and play around with them until you find one that works for you.