Out of the Blue

When I arrived at work Monday morning, I found an email from someone in Germany entitled “Application for an internship in your career services.”

It was addressed to me by name and it was in English. Already I am impressed.

Here’s what it said:

Dear Mrs Kemp,

My name is Brigid Engel (name changed to protect her identity) and I live in the south of Germany near Stuttgart. I am a student of “career counseling” at “Hochschule der Bundesagentur für Arbeit” (roughly translated: “Polytechnic of the Federal Employment Office”). Students of this college are employed at the German Federal Employment Office and get their practical training at job centres all across Germany.

As part of this major and in order to gain more insight and experience, I would like to do an internship at your career center between May 22 and July 31 of 2009. This is very important for me and would be an interesting opportunity to get to know various aspects of the American job market and the social security system of your country, and – quite important for me as a future careers counselor – your education system. So I would like to take this chance and visit the country everyone turns their eyes to: California!

It has always been my dream to spend some time in California at some point in my life. I am a very outgoing, self-confident and ambitious person and I would love to do my internship working with you at the university campus. Teamwork and working with young people is something I really enjoy. I presently work as a tutor for a small group of students at university and before I started my studies of career counseling I was employed by the German social welfare office for two years. I worked in a team during that time and gained valuable work experience in counseling people and meeting their needs. I also had the chance to brush up my English doing a certificate course in business English which I have been able to build on during my recent studies.

Spending some time within your organization, I could learn a lot and also I think a comparison between the Californian and the German system could be very interesting.

There would be no costs for you: I get my usual salary during this time.

Summing up, I would be very glad if you could give me the opportunity to get to know you, to work with you and to live in Santa Barbara and experience the Californian way of life (and work) next year.

I am looking forward to your positive reply!

Yours sincerely,

Brigid Engel

What she did right:

• Addressed the email to me, not “Dear Sir or Madam.”
• Caught my interest in the first sentence by telling me she was studying career counseling, a field near and dear to my heart.
• Described her educational level and related experience in the first two paragraphs.
• Assured me she would be taking care of her own finances. (I still might have been interested if she had needed to be paid, but maybe not. Since she would be a foreign national, it would have put her in a different and more challenging visa category, and this way I don’t have to worry about that.)
• Used a friendly, positive, upbeat and confident tone.

What she could have done better:

• Researched Career Services and target her cover letter more towards my department and less towards how cool she thinks California is.
• Included a copy of her resume.

Why would I want you to know all this? If you are interested in setting up an internship that might appear to be out of the blue to the company you’re approaching, you could do worse than following her example. If you’d like some help in following her example, we have career counselors here who can help you make your application even better than hers.

The end of the story:

I think we’re going to make this happen. It will require some paperwork on my end, but nothing too onerous. She’d get the benefit of learning a bit about the American system of career development and job search, and we’ll learn more about how it’s done in Germany, and hopefully the EU in general.

Micael Kemp is the director of Career Services at UCSB.