You are EQUAL to your employers (even in your internship cover letter)
Plenty of people e-mail us asking questions about small details in their internship cover letters. In this post, I’m going to dig a little deeper and talk about the mindset from which you write an internship cover letter.
In all of our posts, we do our fair share of bashing internship cover letter samples and stress that you need to be confident and be different. We’ve been beating a dead horse by putting down the traditional “To whom it may concern” internship cover letter. And I’m going to beat it some more by going to the root of the bad internship cover letter.
Bad internship cover letters start from the “no value” mindset from which most people write them. When students are searching for internships, a lot of them think, “I will do anything to get this internship.” They want an internship SO bad that they don’t care who gives it to them. If you are in this mindset (consciously or subconsciously) when you are writing an internship cover letter, it will come across like you are BEGGING for an internship from the employer. From an objective point of view, an internship cover letter like this looks desperate in the eyes of an employer (again, consciously or subconsciously). You are putting the internship above you, and your internship cover letter is saying, “You, the employer, hold all of the value in this relationship. I am only a college student. Please give me an internship.”
The solution? Treat your employers as equals in your internship cover letter. Treat the cover letter like you are proposing a partnership. Say to yourself before you write it, “The employees of this company are my equals. I can do what they can do.” Don’t be arrogant, but show your employer that you are confident and have something to offer.
If you do this, whoever is reading your internship cover letter will pick up on it see your value. Don’t beg for internships anymore. Enter the “my employers are my equals” mindset, and your internship cover letter will become a partnership proposal in which both parties offer value to each other.
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For more internship information, go to internship cover letter, internship resume, and intern jobs. For specific resources, go to investment banking internships or marketing internships.
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