Applications for Internship or Graduate Positions.
Recently I have been receiving a lot of emails and applications for either unpaid internships or graduate engineer positions. Not being a large corporation, we do not have a formal intern placement system, so we basically review these as they come in.
I have noticed that 99% of the application emails take the same format.
“Dear Nebo Engineering Manager, (often in a different colour text as it has been copy & pasted)
I am looking for an intern placement, and would love to work for Nebo. Please see attached my university record. I am very hard working.
Let me know if there are any positions vacant.
Regards,
Steve Student. “
I think I have at least 30 versions of this exact email from just the last 2 months! For this reason I thought I would write a quick post with some advice for students before they send another one of these to the next engineering company.
If you are looking for work in what is currently a pretty competitive industry, you need to make yourself stand out. This is particularly important when approaching smaller companies, as they do not have a HR manager to pass you off to, so you are likely to be dealing with either a business owner, or a senior engineer. This is a great opportunity – but to capitalise on it, you need to understand that these people are very busy and generally don’t want to spend time going through student records.
Below are some points to consider when writing an application email. Remember – you are looking for 8 – 12 weeks of work, surely spending a few hours on a good email is time well spent.
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