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Writing a cover letter can feel like a daunting task, particularly if you don’t have a lot of “real world” experience. Fortunately, a cover letter is actually an exceptional chance to explain how your extracurriculars or classes taught you leadership and time management skills.

To really stand out, it’s important to personalize your cover letter for each internship application. You shouldn’t use your cover letter as a chance to reiterate your whole resume. This is your chance to pick out a few keywords from the position description, and dive into examples showing how you’ve exibited these skills.

We’ve created an internship cover letter template to provide some initial structure and inspiration, but we don’t expect this template to be one-size-fits-all. Ideally, you’ll supplement our template with your own creativity and flair.

Formatting

There are different formats you can use when writing cover letters, but you can’t go wrong with the following business letter format. Regardless of the format you choose to follow, it’s critical you proofread, use formal terms such as “Dear” and “Sincerely,” and lean towards a professional tone whenever possible.

Your Name

Your Address

Your City, State, Zip Code

Cell: 555-555-5555

Email: name@email.com

Date

Department

Company

Street

City, State Zip

Dear X, (try to find hiring manager’s name… if you can’t, you can put “Dear [Company A] Hiring Committee”)

[Paragraph One]

[Body Paragraphs]

[Closing Paragraph]

Sincerely,

(*leave four spaces for your signature, then type your name underneath the four spaces)

Caroline Forsey

Paragraph One:

In the first paragraph, explain how you heard about the company or position, and if you know anyone at the company, mention them here. Next, express your own interest in the company or position and explain briefly how it relates to your own passions. Introduce yourself in this paragraph, writing your name, your education level, your major, and your interests.

Paragraph Two and Three:

Scan the internship position description and pick out a few qualities you think apply to you — just don’t choose all the descriptors mentioned (it will appear disingenuous and make your cover letter too long). For instance, if I see a company is looking for someone who’s “outgoing, organized, hardworking, and willing to take criticism,” I would pick those that describe me best and focus on providing examples in the body of my cover letter.

Mentioning the traits directly in your cover letter shows you’ve read the position description, and makes your cover letter more scannable. If the hiring manager is looking for someone with content skills, she might scan your cover letter looking for the words that indicate experience with content.

Finally, brainstorm a few compelling examples to show how you embody the most important characteristics. Don’t just write, “I have excellent customer service skills.” You need to prove it. Support your claim by writing, “Last summer, I worked at as an orientation leader at my college, serving as a resource for incoming students and their parents. This experience strengthened my customer service skills.”

Even if you don’t have a lot of (or any) job experience, think about highlighting skills you’ve gained from extracurriculars, volunteer experience, or even passion projects (e.g.: “my passion for dance led me to becoming a volunteer dance teacher, which helped me develop as a leader”).

Closing:

If the internship application does not specify “please do not contact,” you might choose to conclude by specifying how you will follow up, such as, “I will call next week to see if my qualifications are a match,” or, “I am eager to meet with you to discuss this opportunity, and am available for an interview at a mutually convenient time.” Conclude by thanking the hiring manager for taking the time to consider you, and end on a positive, confident note, such as, “I look forward to speaking with you soon.”

Sample Cover Letters

Option A)

Caroline Forsey

1 Hireme Road

Boston, MA, 20813

Cell: 555-555-5555

Email: cforsey@hireme.com

April 15, 2018

Event Planning Department — Internship Program

Company A

35 Recruiting St.

Boston, MA, 29174

Dear Internship Coordinator,

At the suggestion of John Smith, a senior marketer at Company A, I am submitting my resume for the Event Coordinator internship position. I am a junior at Elon University, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Sport and Event Management, and am passionate about event planning. I am thrilled to hear about Company A’s Event Coordinator internship program, and feel my experiences and skills would be an excellent match for your organization.

As an executive member of the Student Union Board at Elon, I am in charge of organizing, promoting, and implementing multiple school-related social activities per week, while being challenged to design new events. I work cohesively with a diverse team made up of students and faculty, and I also foster relationships with novelty companies.

My experience as an Orientation Leader has further prepared me for this internship. It was essential that I remain positive, outgoing, and energized during move-in day and act as a liaison between new students, families, and faculty in a fast-paced and demanding environment. I was expected to maintain a highly professional customer service ethic while interacting with families and new students.

My Elon University experiences, executive board membership, and orientation leadership role have prepared me to be successful in the Event Coordinator internship program. Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to the opportunity to discuss how I can add value to Company A.

Sincerely,

(handwritten signature)

Caroline Forsey

Option B)

Caroline Forsey

1 Hireme Road

Boston, MA, 20813

Cell: 555-555-5555

Email: cforsey@hireme.com

April 15, 2018

Marketing Department — Internship Program

Company A

35 Recruiting St.

Boston, MA, 29174

Dear Internship Coordinator,

I am a passionate, creative, and driven Elon University student with leadership and event planning experience, as well as strong communication skills. I am seeking opportunities to showcase my writing abilities in a challenging and stimulating environment. My skills and experiences will enable me to deliver successful results as a digital marketing intern for Company B.

Please allow me to highlight my key skills:

• Prior experience writing blog posts and press releases for marketing objectives
• Strong communication skills and ability to adopt voice for diverse audiences and varying purposes
• Efficient in managing multiple projects with fast moving deadlines through organization and time-management skills
• A firm understanding of grammar rules and how to write effectively
• Experience in leadership positions, both as Student Union Board executive leader and as an Elon Orientation Leader
• Proven ability to form positive relationships with people from around the globe, exhibited by my internship experience in China last summer
• Experience organizing, promoting, and implementing social events
• Proficient in Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Photoshop, and Premiere), and social media platforms

In closing, I look forward to the opportunity to discuss how I can be an asset to Company B. I will call next week to see if you agree that my qualifications are a match for the position. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

(handwritten signature)

Caroline Forsey

When you first start a business, you’re laser-focused on the quality of your product — polish the idea, build it, rebuild it, test it, go to market.

Money doesn’t matter much yet. You might have initial funding, but all of it goes to research and development.

But when that product begins to sell, and funding turns into revenue, you have more bookkeeping to do so the business can remain profitable as it serves more customers. A common financial figure that successful businesses must calculate is their profit margin: the amount that a business’s revenue from sales exceeds its total costs to actually run the business.

A more specific figure, which is especially important when pricing new products, is contribution margin. Here’s a simple definition:

Your Contribution Margin Per Unit in Under 200 Words

Your contribution margin is the amount that your revenue from one sale exceeds, or is exceeded by, the costs you paid to develop that one sold unit. These costs are called variable costs, and they vary as your business makes more products. So, if you spend $50 to make one unit of your product, and you sell that one unit for $75, your contribution margin is $25 ($75 minus $50).

As an equation: contribution margin = revenue from 1 unit – variable cost to make 1 unit.

Contribution margins differ from profit margins in that contribution margins only take into account the variable costs of developing your product, excluding the fixed costs a business pays to stay in operation.

For example, a variable cost to a software company might be storage space on the cloud, and a fixed cost would be a lease on office space. The cost to host customer data on the cloud can change as new customers are signed, but the company pays the same rent to the building manager regardless of how many customers it loses or gains.

Easy enough, right?

Contribution Margin Ratio

As a business develops new goods and services, contribution margins expressed as a dollar amount aren’t super helpful in determining how much each product contributes to the business’s bottom line. In these cases, it’s important to convert the contribution margin to a figure that better represents an individual product’s value to the company. This is where the contribution margin ratio comes in.

This percentage can help determine how a certain product compares to the rest of a company’s offerings, in terms of its profitability.

Take our original $50 product example: If your CM was $25, and you sold the item for $75, your CM ratio would be roughly 33.3%, since $25 is 33.3% of $75 — your total revenue from that sale. What if you developed another product that cost $110 to make and sold for $150? Your CM would be $150 minus $110, or $40 — higher than the CM of your first product. So it’s a more valuable product, right?

Not necessarily. Just because your second product netted more revenue than your first doesn’t mean it’s a more profitable item.

According to the definition and formula above, your CM ratio for your second item is $40 divided by $150, or 26.7% (lower than your first product’s 33.3%). This means your second product brings in more revenue than your first product, but isn’t as profitable because of the high variable cost to make it.

While repricing your product can make you more profitable, don’t try to increase your profit margin or contribution margin through accounting alone. Investigate the market and talk to your audience. Find out what your customers are asking for — you’d be surprised by how much they’d pay for a service you might easily be able to develop.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared this afternoon before a joint hearing held by the Senate Judiciary and Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committees.

The hearing, officially titled “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data,” was created largely in response to March revelations that voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained and misused personal user data. The data was obtained when University of Cambridge researcher Dr. Aleksandr Kogan developed an app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” that scraped the personal data of myriad Facebook users.

Among other pieces of information to emerge today, Zuckerberg confirmed that Kogan actually sold this data to other firms beyond Cambridge Analytica, including Eunoia Technologies: the company founded by whistleblower Chris Wylie, who once worked for Cambridge Analytica but left to start this company.

But the data breach, as it was largely dubbed today, wasn’t just limited to those who downloaded the app — many friends of users who did also had their personal data scraped, which amounted to Facebook’s total estimated 87 million people whose information was improperly obtained. Facebook began alerting affected users this morning with in-app displays.

Well, I’m one of the 87 million. pic.twitter.com/Tq8ITHQy78

— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier)
April 10, 2018

It was the first of two Congressional hearings for Zuckerberg this week, with a second scheduled to take place tomorrow morning with the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Here were the key points made in today’s hearings.

5 Recurring Themes From Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing

1. Mea Culpa

For anyone who’s been following the story so far, much of what was discussed at today’s hearing was not exactly new. Zuckerberg’s opening remarks appeared to be borrowed directly from the written testimony submitted for tomorrow’s House hearing, and many of his responses seemed to be rooted in a handful of key themes that have recurred throughout Facebook’s response over the past three and a half weeks.

Among these is an ongoing self-admittance of wrongdoing on Zuckerberg’s part, with him stating at one point, “I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”

“I am committed to getting this right. This begins with the … responsibility to protect people’s data, which we failed to do with Cambridge Analytica.” – Zuckerberg

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
April 10, 2018

But this apology and acceptance of accountability set the tone for many of the Senators’ questions today, including Senator Cortez Masto who bluntly told Zuckerberg, “Stop apologizing. Let’s make the change.”

While many of the joint committee members weren’t quite as tough on Zuckerberg as might have been expected, many of them attempted to base their queries on flaws made in the explanations and statements that have emerged since the Cambridge Analytica story first broke. Senator Kamala Harris, for example, asked Zuckerberg if he was part of the decision not to notify users that their data may have been compromised when it first learned of the possible misuse in 2015. 

Zuckerberg could not provide a clear answer to that question, stating that he does not remember such a conversation. When Harris further pressed him to clarify whether that conversation never took place at all or if he simply wasn’t part of it, he still was unable to directly answer, further blaming a lack of memory of any such discussion. 

Zuckerberg continues to imply that he just doesn’t remember, but admits that a mistake was made. https://t.co/jrvYgW8ljC

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
April 10, 2018

Members of the press also identified gaps in Zuckerberg’s claims and statements made today. For example, he repeatedly claimed that one change Facebook would make is further clarifying its terms and conditions to make it more concise, because he didn’t think most users would take the time to ready such a lengthy document. (More on that below).

But as Slate reporter Will Oremus was quick to remind, Facebook already has the capacity to measure exactly how long Facebook users spend looking at any given post — raising the question of why it doesn’t know (or reveal) how long users look at the terms they’re asked to consent to.

But I guess knowing whether Facebook users actually understand what they’re consenting to isn’t as important as knowing exactly how much time they spend looking at every post: https://t.co/1Aclr1MLz7

— Will Oremus (@WillOremus)
April 10, 2018

2. “Facebook Does Not Sell User Data”

Zuckerberg vehemently emphasized today that Facebook does not sell data to third parties, which he has been doing throughout many statements made since the Cambridge Analytica data misuse was first revealed.

However, Facebook’s monetization of data continued to be a key point among the questioning Senators, with many of them pushing Zuckerberg for an answer on how Facebook will be able to continue to be profitable without it.

ZUCK: We don’t sell user data to advertisers.
Sen. Cornyn: Well, you certainly rent it.

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
April 10, 2018

But no one, including Zuckerberg himself, seemed to have a clear answer on how to strike a balance between Facebook’s monetization model of creating targeted ads using non-identifiable personal user data, while also regulating user privacy. That led to the discussion of statements made in recent interviews with Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg — where she indicated that a payment model might roll out to allow users to completely restrict their data from being used in this way, for a fee. 

Today, Zuckerberg did not provide an explicitly clear message on whether or not users will have to pay to opt out of having their data used to create targeted ads or an otherwise personalized experience.

3. The Terms of Service

Many questions arose during the hearing about ways to keep users better informed about how their data is collected and used, along with the general, overall clarity of Facebook’s policies.

Facebook recently rewrote many of these policies and terms with the intention of making them clearer and easier to both understand and read, while also including the “nuances” of legality that Zuckerberg spoke to earlier today. In fact, Zuckerberg mentioned more than once that he does not believe most users read the entire Terms of Service [TOS] document.

For that reason, many Senators said, there’s a fear that users don’t exactly understand what, exactly, they’re volunteering or opting into as a result to agreeing to these terms. It could be argued that this phenomenon is an underlying cause to the Cambridge Analytica scandal: that most users didn’t completely understand that, by agreeing to the TOS, they were also granting permission to third-party apps to collect their personal data.

Sen. Graham: Do you think the average user understands what they’re signing up for?
ZUCK: I don’t think the average consumer reads that entire document.

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
April 10, 2018

But one other item came up: that the terms of service for Kogan’s app were in direct contradiction of Facebook’s own terms, which the network seems to have overlooked at the time. To visualize this, Senator Richard Blumenthal displayed these contrasting terms in large print within the hearing room, calling this oversight “reckless.”

Sen. Blumenthal is displaying TOS from Kogan’s app that conflict with the FTC consent decree, and calls Facebook’s oversight of it “Blindly reckless.” pic.twitter.com/BvmkHZvZUQ

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
April 10, 2018

4. Regulation

The moments when Zuckerberg seemed legitimately caught off-guard were few. One came when Senator Dick Durbin attempted to make a point about privacy and how much personal information people want to reveal, including Zuckerberg himself, when he asked the Facebook CEO if he would tell everyone where he was staying while in D.C.

Sen. Durbin: Mr. Zuckerberg, would you feel comfortable telling us which hotel you stayed in last night?
ZUCK: Uh … uh … no.

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
April 10, 2018

The topic of regulation also came up a number of times, and at certain moment sparked debate, with more than one Senator asking Zuckerberg if he thinks that the European Union is moving in the right direction with the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) coming into force next month.

Many of the tougher moments for Zuckerberg also came when asked about the regulation of Facebook. Zuckerberg repeatedly blamed Facebook’s origins of having “started in my dorm room” on its reactive nature to such crises as weaponization and data misuse. It fell into that habit, he said, because AI tools weren’t available at that time to combat many of the underlying problems, forcing Facebook into a vicious cycle of being less than proactive.

In previous interviews and closes sessions with the press, Zuckerberg has provided mixed answers to questions about his take on the GPDR, ranging from agreeing with it “in spirit” to subsequently remarking, “if we are planning on running the controls for GDPR across the world … my answer [is] yes.”

Today, Zuckerberg continued to give equally wavering responses to questions about the GDPR. When asked by Senator Lindsey Graham is he believes the European Union “got it right,” he tentatively answered, “I think they get things right.”

But there was some concern expressed about the possible impact of widespread regulation on smaller, emerging companies, from both certain Senators and Zuckerberg himself. When Senator Dan Sullivan expressed fears that such laws would “stifle … the next Facebook,” Zuckerberg responded, “That’s the problem with regulation”: that as a big company, Facebook has the resources to manage it, while more fledgling companies might not.

5. Dorm Room Origins

Much of the conversation around regulation stemmed from the repeated talk of Facebook’s humble roots, into which Zuckerberg continuously leaned by reminding the joint committee members numerous times that he started the company “in my dorm room.”

And at more than one point, he blamed these origins on Facebook’s reactive nature to emerging crises — the weaponization of it to spread divisive and false information, possibly influence elections, and other incidents leading up to the Cambridge Analytica revelations. 

The lack of AI tools available during Facebook’s earliest days, Zuckerberg said, is part of what prevented Facebook from being able to detect many issues proactively. That not only includes the aforementioned weaponization, but also such problems as online bullying, promoting false advertising, and hate speech.

That caused Facebook to fall into a pattern of reactivity instead, said Zuckerberg, as well as his own misunderstanding of the company’s role and responsibility as the network exponentially grew.

ZUCK: “The broadest mistake we made here was not taking a broad enough view of our responsibility. … The big mistake we made, looking back on this, was viewing our responsibility as just building tools” and not making sure they’re used for good.

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
April 10, 2018

But now, with the help of the AI tools that Zuckerberg frequently said Facebook has come to rely upon, that proactivity is more feasible and becoming more ingrained. It was with the help of machine learning, for example, that Facebook accomplished many of its successes in combating weaponization following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, such as removing IRA accounts and other sources of misinformation leading up to elections in France and Alabama.

Hate speech, however, is a much bigger hurdle for which Zuckerberg does not see an immediately sustainable fix. Because this language is very “nuanced,” the AI tools to detect it are not quite sophisticated enough to determine what’s abusive or hate speech, and what’s a strong statement of opinion. 

The rollout of that sophisticated AI, Zuckerberg predicts, could feasibly become available within the next five years.

Some problems “lend themselves to AI tools more than others. Hate speech is one of the toughest. … Contrast that with an area of something like battling terrorist propaganda,” says Zuckerberg, listing the times Facebook has successfully done the latter.

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
April 10, 2018

Looking Ahead

Zuckerberg is due back on the Hill tomorrow for a hearing with the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where I expect to hear more about how he views the role of Facebook in the context of regulation and the purpose that the company serves. Its core nature as a business came up more than once today, with many wondering where exactly it falls: Tech, information aggregation, or media.

Sen. Sullivan: Are you a tech company, or are you the world’s largest publisher? I think that’ll go into the regulation you face.
Zuckerberg: Senator, that’s a really big question. … I consider us a tech company. … We’re responsible for the content, but we don’t publish [it].

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
April 10, 2018

But today was a long day, and for anything that wasn’t mentioned here, feel free to check out my Twitter account of the day’s events.

I’m back on the Hill again tomorrow, too, and will continue to bring you these ongoing live developments.

Featured image credit: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik