Let’s Write a Cover Letter
- Lauren B
- 0
- on Nov 10, 2022
This week was interesting for me. Though I’m entirely aware that writing a cover letter is an important step in finding a job, a part of me doesn’t want to write one because I’m scared of what it might mean. The future is unknown and the vagueness of it scares me. I like knowing what comes next so I can appropriately plan for it but you can’t really do that with jobs. It’s not something that will be guaranteed, or something you just have to ask for, it’s something that you have to win. Beyond that, I don’t have any job experience yet which makes me even more worried about finding a job. If I have no experience, how will I even get a job then? The closest I’ve come to a job is volunteering in my middle school’s library and for a leadership program. For both, all I did was ask the main person in charge if I could do it and they said yes. There was no interview or process to apply. Additionally, I had already spent a lot of time in the library and around the main librarian since she ran a club I was a part of so I knew she would say yes anyway.
I feel like a large part of me knows that volunteer work is nothing to ignore and it can be relevant in some circumstances but then there’s another part of me that feels like it doesn’t matter because it’s not direct work experience. Even though I’ve definitely completed tasks that can be considered work experience. My main volunteer experience comes from volunteering in my middle school library during the summer. There I helped to organize new Chromebooks and register every single one in the school’s system, laminate papers, copy papers, decorate the library, shelve books, organize papers, and enter new books into the library’s system. I did that volunteer work for six years and yet I feel like it shouldn’t go on a resume. I feel like a lot of this idea stems from how society values work and volunteer work even though oftentimes you can be doing the same task just under that differing label. Even though I completed 60 hours of volunteer work at my library during one summer, I know that it won’t be considered the same as working in an internship.
Writing a cover letter will help me dip my toes into the water of the future. There have been so many times when I’m nervous to do something but once I start actually partaking in an action related to it a lot of those nerves dissipate. This is because I can confront what’s making me nervous and the further I get along in the action the more I realize that it’s not as hard as it seemed in my head or that if it is hard, I have the skill set to handle it properly. It also lessens my nerves because then the whole assignment isn’t sitting in front of me, I can start to break it down into chunks that don’t seem as intimidating. Hopefully, as I write the cover letter I’ll realize that a lot of my volunteer experience has meaning and can properly connect to job listings. Once I start, the future will feel less uncertain because at least when I’m done I’ll have something concrete that can be used beyond this class. This cover letter is something I can use when I start to apply for jobs, if I do it within the next year or so and that fact really comforts me.
