For Project 1 you will prepare documents related to the job search process: a résumé, an application letter, a recommendation request, and other materials. You will find a specific job ad for a job in your field that you will be qualified for when you graduate with your undergraduate degree. Ideally, you will be able to make use of the documents you produce for this project when you go on the job market as you near graduation.

Most of you have created professional materials in the past. You’ve visited career services, talked to professors in your major, possibly spoken to professionals in your fields, and maybe even gotten a job or internship with your current résumé and cover letter. I do not want to duplicate your past efforts, so for this assignment, we will be focusing on how to make yourself stand out from a large stack of qualified applicants. As such, we will learn things like using design principles to your advantage, focusing on your best qualifications rather than jamming everything onto the page, and really selling yourself rather than simply listing the things you have accomplished.

For this assignment you will prepare:
~ a cover memo addressed to me that details your work on this project, including how you adapted your application materials to best optimize them for the job opening you’ve targeted and why you made the choices you did
~ an accomplishments and qualifications audit
~ a cover letter
~ a résumé
~ a recommendation request email
~ an interview follow-up message

Accomplishments and Qualifications Audit
Think about the work and related experience that you might include in your résumé and discuss in your application letter. How can you make these things meaningful to potential employers? Simply listing what have you done may not be enough. Instead, you’ll want to sell your target audience on your accomplishments and qualifications. To achieve this, you’ll need to articulate for yourself what those things are and why they are meaningful. The accomplishments and qualifications audit, therefore, asks you to list what you’ve accomplished in your various work and related experiences and how that makes you a qualified candidate for a particular position. You should be sure, that is, to frame your experiences not simply as duties you completed, but as accomplishments, and you should make clear to your target audience why those accomplishments are meaningful in the context of the job opening for which you are applying.

Résumé
Please be sure to prioritize what information is best suited for inclusion in your résumé. A résumé should not simply be a list of everything you have done. Rather, it should include the information that best makes a case for why an employer should grant you an interview.

Your résumé should reflect attention to basic design principles. Also, try to limit your résumé to one page in length, unless your career field typically expects a longer document. Every Smeal degree program recommends a one-page resume.

Cover Letter
Your cover letter should follow the proper conventions and format for a block or modified-block letter, and it should be no more than two pages long. Your goal is to sell yourself to your employer; try to address how you specifically can make their company better/more efficient and what you bring that no one else can.

At the very least, you should consider having a paragraph in your letter for each of the following items:
~ introduction
~ education and training (including specific courses and projects if they are relevant)
~ work experience (including specific details and relevant discussion)
~ other relevant qualifications, activities, skills, and interests
~ conclusion

Recommendation Request Email
An effective recommendation request makes a compelling case for why the recommender should recommend you. It provides useful information for the recommender to consider, such as what you’ve applied for and why, and it makes clear to the recommender your accomplishments and qualifications. The better you prepare your recommender, the better your letter of recommendation will likely be.

Interview Follow-up Message
For this document, you will pretend that you have had an interview with an employer, and you are sending a thank you message afterwards. Follow-up messages, whether they be sent as emails, letters, or hand-written cards, are simple courtesies, yes, but they are also strategic opportunities. They provide an occasion for you to follow-up on something you said in the interview, for you to clarify a particular point or issue, and for you to express your continued interest in the position, among other things.

Evaluative Criteria
~ Content-wise, the résumé is well-organized and represents your most relevant (for this job) accomplishments and qualifications.
~ The résumé’s design reflects attention to basic design principles and the contexts of its use.
~ The application letter makes a compelling case for your candidacy for the position, especially considering the company that is your audience for the document.
~ All materials are well-written, free of mistakes in spelling, grammar, and mechanics, and conform to appropriate business writing conventions.
~ The cover memo adequately details the work you did preparing your materials and justifies the decisions you made in targeting your chosen job opening.

Project Submission
Please submit all documents as a single .pdf file to the Job Application Packet Final Draft assignment on Canvas. Combining all of the documents into one single file will make it easier for me to grade them. They should appear in the order you are given at the beginning of this assignment sheet.