A good story teller starts at the beginning, but a skilled cover letter writer starts in the middle. I’m talking about the body of your cover letter – AKA the middle one-two paragraphs. This is where the most important content of your cover letter should live, and so it’s the section you should spend the most time on.
So what do you put in this paragraph(s)? The body of your cover letter is where you should showcase your skills and experiences that most closely align with the description/requirements of the job that you’re applying for. That’s why the CSE requires incoming students to complete the “Cover Letter Exercise”:
What is the CSE Cover Letter Exercise?
The Exercise: Prepare to write a cover letter by choosing a job/internship description (either a position that you plan on applying to or one that you find interesting) and identifying two to three important requirements listed in the description that you are trying to address (and demonstrate evidence of) in your cover letter. Think about how you might address these requirements using your own experience and jot down your notes before you begin.
For example, if the job description asks for “High level of accuracy and attention to detail with sound analytical skills”, for the exercise you would write down “I plan to talk about my experience in the MA state treasury where I had to update a dataset every month that contained data about every birth that happened in each Massachusetts hospital, in order to glean relevant insights about which hospitals the office should target with their new program which began in January 2020 and targets babies that are 1 year old and under.”*
From there, you could address another job description requirement – i.e. “High level of intellectual curiosity and are comfortable with ambiguity” with the following strategy: “I will speak about the previously mentioned experience and how my boss gave me vague instructions of wanting to create a visual map of the state that also displayed different information such as population density, birth density, and numerous other characteristics. I will highlight that I took the initiative to explore with numerous different software such as Tableau and ARCGIS to achieve the desired result.”
With the plan to address these two requirements in mind, it will be much easier to focus on keywords and sentence flow while creating the first draft of your resume body.
Become a cover letter connoisseur by practicing the cover letter exercise – and saving your notes in one place so you can refer to them when applying for other positions!
WAIT BEFORE YOU CLICK SUBMIT APPLICATION – Did you include a call to action? Is your cover letter free of grammatical and formatting errors? Did you properly address the recipient? Self-check yourself and review the CSE Cover Letter Guide before you hit “submit” – you’ll thank yourself (and me!) later.
Additional Cover Letter Resources
This guide contains the keys to writing a compelling cover letter.
CSE Cover Letter Examples
This guide contains cover letter examples to help you craft your own cover letter.
Helpful hint! Check out these additional resources: Dictionary – Spruce up your resume’s vocabulary, Thesaurus – Liven up your resume’s language and find new words to avoid redundancy and Grammarly – For help with grammar, spelling, style, tone, and more, Grammarly is a free browser extension that will give you personalized writing recommendations as you compose your cover letter.
*Examples provided by graduated Career Captain (2020)
