Free write

I have a pretty busy week coming up, and I'm going to be going crazy. My week starts with my birthday tomorrow, and continues with a midterm in Italian. I'm not sure what I'm going to do for the big 21 yet, but I won't have time to make it exciting. I have more midterms this week and I work everyday at Littlejohn. I'd like to sit back and watch some of the movies that are getting Oscars tonight, but that won't be happening for a while. I did see Juno and really liked it. Oh well, back to Italian cramming. ciao

The Excitement of Cover Letters

I recently wrote a cover letter for an internship I was applying for, so this advice makes sense to me. I focused by letter not just on my accomplishments, but also on how my skills would benefit the company. The advice here is big on selling how you can help the company, and I think that can be hard to do sometimes. While you should know about what you are applying for, you might not know exactly what job you will be doing within the company. Saying that your work ethic will benefit the company sounds contrived to me, but if you know specifics about where you can impact directly it will work better. I think that making it personal is important, and knowing who you are talking to is smart. I imagine there will be times when I apply for something when I won't be able to find this out, but saying "To Whom it May Concern" doesn't show any interest. The advice that I need to take most from this article is about really following up the cover letter. In my letter, I gave all of my relevant contact information and asked them to contact me when they returned from the holidays. I did not tell them that I would follow-up if they failed to contact me, and I ended up waiting around for an email. Finally, I sent a follow-up email, but I should have shown more interest and initiative by writing in the letter when I would check back with the company. I think most of the information will come in handy when I do my cover letter for my mock interview in class. I am going to change it a little because I am interviewing for law school and not a job. For the law school applications, you send them a two-page personal statement that is supposed to be about you personally. A way to show them another side of you different from your resume. These are different tools, but they do share some common aspects.

Surviving Interviews

I don't think there is anything worse than having to sit through an interview. It is tourture. I have been through a couple, and one was incrediblely stressful. I felt like every answer I gave was wrong, and I didn't have anything insightful to ask them at the end. The first article I read talked about different ways to relax during the interview. I think that visualizing yourself succeeding may be helpful, but my imagination doesn't always allow me to pick what it runs away with. The key of the article seemed to be just stay relaxed and show the interviewer that you feel comfortable. It gave some good tips on how to appear relaxed. The second article that I read talked about asking questions, and this is one area that I have a lot of trouble with. They broke it down by who is interviewing you because some questions are more appropriate for certain people. The key for me is to get a handful of questions ready before the interview that are not likely to be answered during it. The next interview I will probably go through will be to get into law school, so I will need to have questions about the process and school ready to go. This is just hard because I feel like the questions I ask show that I am not fully knowledgeable about the school. The sample questions given by the article asked were not really straight informational questions, but they didn't seem very real to me. I can't see myself asking "What type of employees tend to excel at this company?" I want to ask more personal questions about the school that will actually impact me, so I need to prepare those. I can incorporate the visualization with this in seeing myself asking the interviewer my questions.

Global warming

My article on global warming is from last april, but it had some convincing evidence in it. Unlike MLK, who skillfully blended ethos, logos, and pathos, this article relied almost exclusively on logos. It presented the facts of how global warming has increased and who is the culprit, us. It argues that humans are the reason global warming has increased, and while this is pretty accepted now, last year at this time, our president still refused to admit that there was a problem. I liked how the article subtly addressed this by mentioning that the 2007 State of the Union was the first time that Bush mentioned the growing climate crisis. I think that MLK was using a combination because he really needed to appeal to emotions and logic. Scientists are going to keep attacking with logic because that's what they know how to do and that is what they can give data to back up. Findings on global warming can be presented with some emotion, see Al Gore, but scientists must first prove there is a problem before they can make us realize that we will feel its impact. My article can be found at http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/02/02/climate.change.report/index.html