Journal Com2Kid's Journal: Help request: Please review this cover letter 16

Does this style of cover letter turn you off, or intrigue you more so than usual?

Edit: The resume this cover letter accompanies can be found here.

To Google,

Hello, my name is Devlin Bentley and I am a student at Western Washington University. In the Spring of 2007 I will be graduating from Western, having finally completed the journey of being the first in my family to attend college. Being a bit on the stubborn side, I went at it whole hog, and majored in Computer Science with a minor in mathematics.

Well, here I am now, applying for a job at Google. All of these resume writing guides tell me I am supposed to covertly brag, so I guess that means it is OK for me to admit to being a bit of an over achiever. That at least explains why I have not taken a summer off since 2001 (The summer I spent doing political fund raising is not on my resume, but I assure you, it was spent doing fund raising for whichever party it is that you support!), and why year after year I work through Christmas break.

Now, at this point in my life, I know what I can achieve. The funny thing is, it was a very stupid thing that kept me from succeeding for so long.

Fear.

Fear is strange in many ways. I had a friend who has a contact within Google. Last summer, this contact recommended that she apply for an internship position , but she did not. She was afraid: Afraid that she would look stupid even applying for a job at Google; afraid that she would make a fool of herself during the interview; afraid that she could not keep up with work she would be asked to do if she got the job.

Maybe I should have had more fear, and made this cover letter more formal, more stuffy. Just like 90% of the other cover letters you get. Quite frankly I am sick and tired of writing bland, dry, and stuffy cover letters. Nobody remembers me. Nothing unique shines through.

Fear tells me to solve this problem (writing a cover letter) in the same way that everyone else does. I hope you find the end result of my ignoring fear to be at least somewhat entertaining.

If I do not have the slightest chance of getting the job, I ask that you still email me back and tell me your reaction to this cover letter. If I am going to achieve something here, I shall make entertaining you my goal.

Ah, now then, I do fear that this cover letter is not supposed to exceed a page in length. That means I run short of space to tell you how wonderful a candidate I am (you can count on me in the least being a good natured and humorous coworker, one plus perhaps?). Here, I am supposed to mention how smart I am. Fine then, so be it: I am very smart. Or at least, others keep telling me this. I understand the machines with which I work and I refuse to believe that they are magic, and I insist on knowing about all of their inner secrets. For some reason, people see my desire to understanding how these machines work as a sign of intelligence.

Maybe it is. Maybe a lifetime of late nights reading about CPU architecture (this was before college, for fun!), coding strategies, and about the (short) history of this field, maybe that does make me intelligent.

Or maybe it just means I want to understand it all.

I do want to understand it all. I want to know everything. When I was a child in elementary school, teachers would ask me what my goal in life was. "To know everything" I would reply. They said it was impossible.

Between Google, Wikipedia, and an occasional trip to the public library, I shall prove them wrong yet!

Now, I am over a page. A mistake has been made on my part. Hopefully though, you are still with me.

Math is fun.

Helping people is fun.

Taking what I learned in a course on Geographical Information Systems over to my Java course and making an interactive map of my school that finds the shortest path between any two classrooms was not technically amazing. However, it is a fine case of applying what other students saw as theoretical knowledge, and using it to solve a real world problem.

The problem? I had two classes on opposite sides of campus. 12 minute journey, 10 minute break between classes. The program found a rather unusual route that cut 5 minutes off of the trip time between classes.

People always gush over that assignment. They love it, they want a copy of the program for their own use. As the programmer, I know something though: it was simple, not a sign of genius at all. What it helped me realize is that true genius lies not in the complexity of the algorithm used, but rather in how much an algorithm helps people improve their life.

Which, finally, brings me to why I want to work for Google.

I am smart. I am hard working. I believe in doing the best job that can be done, and pushing myself to the utmost limits of what I am capable of. I regularly solve the hardest of problems during my morning shower. Even more impressive is that I have managed to avoid drenching my keyboard in the rush to type up the solution before I forget it.

I want to work for Google, because I want to make something powerful. Incredible. Or at least just plain nifty. Nifty works. In fact I think nifty works a whole lot better than incredible some times. Things that are incredible get put on a pedestal and never used. Things that are nifty get carried in purses and backpacks and pulled out when needed. Google is nifty. The algorithms it uses are incredible, but it does this magnificent job of presenting information in a nifty way; so people use it. People love it. So yah, I guess I want to make something nifty.

And (remember: reiteration is good) I want to do that at Google.

So, call me for an interview. Send me an email back saying I am getting a chance to try out. Or at least, send me an email saying you found my cover letter entertaining, and that if I accomplished nothing else, I made you laugh a few times.

Sincerely,

[name]