I just finished up my first interview of this coop job-hunting season, and I’m pretty happy with how it went. The company is an independent, IT solutions provider with some pretty ballin’ clients. The interviewers were pretty cool (like cucumbers, not like ice) and the job sounded exactly like the kind of stuff that I’d enjoy doing/learning. It’s sort of a shame that I don’t have as much ASP.NET experience as the position seems to require, but from what I’ve seen of ASP.NET, I don’t think I’ll have a hard time adding this to my list of self-taught skills if it came to it. I hope my question (“What does ‘competitive salary’ mean?”) didn’t leave a greedy impression on the interviewers!
When I got home, I checked JobMine for any updates and lo and behold, I’ve got another interview lined up for next Tuesday. This will be for yet another IT services provider, but markedly larger in size with a longer company history. Again, I’m pretty excited. I was just one of 130+ applicants, and now I’m one of eight interviewees. I’m going to humbly chalk this up to the fact that I wrote a cover letter for this application, and I’m guessing around 130 other people did not.
I think it was in first year where an interviewer recommended that I always write cover letters for any job application that I am serious about (I never got that job by the way, so I guess the point stuck), so I did that for seven of the eight jobs that I applied for this round. So far
- I have not been selected for interviews for five of the seven applications with cover letters.
- I have the one interview next week for an application with a cover letter.
- I have yet to hear back about the last application with a cover letter.
- I have just finished my interview for the only application I made without any cover letter.
Note: Each of the cover letters I did write were from scratch and job-specific, so it’s not like I am being selected/rejected for a generic cover letter.
Seeing as how my Statistics midterm is coming next week and I have no actual idea what to make of these results… I’d say my mark is going to be approximately M ~ G(50, 15).