It was my senior year of high school and I was running for Central Region Vice President of DECA (a high school organization for business-ey kids, yes you can tell the nerds early).

I needed to raise somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000 in order to cover the cost of campaign booths, flyers, giveaways, etc. Both Illinois DECA and some local high school’s contributed to the campaign, but I was left with around $3,000 to raise. The only problem, I didn’t have a job and I didn’t want to ask my parents. I knew that running a regular fundraiser selling coffee or candy wouldn’t raise nearly the amount of money needed. So I launched a different plan.

It was 2015 and portable power banks were all the rage. Everyone now had smartphones, but the battery life on these things was still quite lacking. I realized most stores were selling these things for around $20.

I went to my favorite website on the internet, Alibaba and realized I could buy these things for about $2/piece. I drafted up some flyers and got started. But instead of selling them to students myself I decided to sell them as a fundraising opportunity for other schools.

The dreaded career fair. Love them or hate them, it’s where big firms recruit most of their students. The fact is that people DO get internships at career fairs, your goal is to make sure you are one of them.

When tasked with writing a cover letter, most everyone goes to google and searches for a cover letter template. Trust me, I have been there. The thing is every cover letter template sucks. No matter how good the template, a copied template sucks. It’s like trying to make a movie by replicating Star Wars. The problem is that it lacks genuineness and narrative.

Right now, take 5 minutes and write a cover letter to your dream company. One caveat, don’t look up a single template or glance at an old cover letter you’ve written. Ready. Set. Go.

So what did you come up with? Odds are it’s pretty usable, let’s go ahead and make some improvements.

Acquire Your Target:

One of the quickest ways to set yourself apart from other candidates is showing that you’ve done your homework. It’s easy to write “Dear recruiter,” but it’s a lot more impressive to address it to a specific individual.

If you’ve networked with someone in person, that’s a start. If not, consider using LinkedIn and figure out who you are likely emailing.

Do Your Research:

Prove that you are not simply copy pasting the same cover letter to every job listing you see. Talk about something that you know the company does that interests you. It does not have to be hard. When I met a recruiter at Toyota, I talked about the new redesigned Camry, a freaking Camry (one of the most vanilla vehicles in the world of automobiles). While I might have lost a few jalopy points for knowing so much about the Camry, it showed the recruiter that I had been keeping up with the company.

Tell a Story (in tweet form):

Tell a short story about who you are and why you are applying. It does not need to be vivid with details, but a cute intro will do. If you don’t believe that you can tell a story in that span, remember Hemmingway wrote a story in 6 words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn” – Ernest Hemingway).

Compare two options.

I would love to intern for Toyota this summer. I believe my experience in finance and design, along with my experience from being part of the business council qualify me for this internship. It would be a dream come true to work for Toyota.

This is a pretty typical introduction for an email. Following most advice, it does the job, it’s clear, concise, and has a definite ask for the company. But it fails to stand out from just about every other cover letter. Let’s try a more unique introduction.

Going to the dealership as a kid was like going to Disneyland. Growing up my friends were fascinated with sports cars, but I was intrigued by how cars were built and designed. Maybe it’s because my family always drove practical cars like Toyota’s. Now that I have some finance and design knowledge, I would love to help the team that makes these fascinating cars.

It will not win a Pulitzer, but at least it stands out from 80% of cover letters.

Offer Value:

We’ve already talked about this. But it’s important to re-iterate that your cover letter should focus on how you can offer value.

When I worked at Kammok and was going through the general email account, I would see dozens of emails that were all the same. They all started with introducing themselves and how they would love to work for the company or how it was their dream to work in the industry. Rarely did we see emails where someone included tangible reasons for how they would benefit the company.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s wonderful that you see a specific company as your gateway to fulfilling your dreams. But, it is not compelling for an employer to dwell on what they can do for you.

As a stranger, especially one trying to grow a business, employers care much more about how you can help grow their business than about how they can fulfill your dreams. If you can prove your value to someone else’s operation, you are already ahead of 80% of candidates. Here’s the thing, once you do land the opportunity, you will have plenty of chances to grow and learn. Again, it’s about framing the relationship.

Edit Away:

I have made the mistake of misspelling a company’s name in a cover letter and still managed to get the job, but for all intents and purposes your cover letter is a) a pitch on why you would add value to the company b)a signal of how vested in the company you are c) an indicator of the work that you do.

If you expect someone to take an hour to interview you, they expect that you take ten minutes to edit your letter. The simple reason you need to make sure your letter is meticulous is that everyone else’s will be meticulous. And if you do not put in effort into your cover letter, why would an employer expect you to do better work once they hire you.

Not to beat a dead horse, but edit your cover letters.

They Don’t Have Their Act Together: 

You might be excited to start your internship, but odds are it’s just another day in the office for everyone you’re working with. You may have known your start date for months, but your manager probably just found out that you were joining their team yesterday. So don’t be surprised when you aren’t assigned a project on day one. It might take a week or two.

It might take a while for them to set you up with a laptop or company badge (I’ve heard stories of interns not getting a badge to go to the bathroom until 5 weeks in). Every internship I’ve been has had me sitting around the first week or two. Don’t take it personally. Just sit tight and use the time to network.

It’s Exhausting

In college you probably spend 60+ hours a week between class, homework, studying and extracurriculars. But you get plenty of naps and breaks in between.

The first week you start working a 9-5 job, where you stare at a screen all day, you’ll find yourself exhausted. Add in commuting and getting ready for work (you can’t show up in sweatpants anymore) and you’ll find that the first week is going to feel long.

I forget this every year when I start interning. After a few days, you’ll find ways of breaking up the monotony.

More importantly, remember not to make judgments about working there right off the bat. Every job is going to feel slow at first, but remember it’s your responsibility to keep yourself energized.

You Have a Golden Telephone

You can talk to anyone.

No, I’m not trying to motivate you like your mom did in first grade. But here’s the secret. If you want to talk to your manager, they’ll make time. Want to talk to your manager’s manager, just send an email. Want to talk to the VP, just ask. Even if his or her calendar is chock full, they’ll find the time. After all, they only have 10 weeks to sell you on the dream of working there.

I’ve been able to talk to CEO’s and partners of companies I’ve worked at simply by asking. Once you’re full time you might not get that access, but as an intern, nobody is off limits.

Those connections don’t die once you join the firm. Take the time now to build those relationships, because those open doors slowly close off once you’re a full-time employee.

If you knew me in high school, I was adamant that I would never work for someone. I would have scoffed at the idea of being an employee.

To me, the entrepreneurial dream was to never work for someone else a day in my life. The narrative you hear is of the entrepreneur that started a business in school and never had to find a job.

That all changed when I went to Kammok. I learned more in that one year than I would have if I spent 10 years piddling around with some ideas in my room.

In my year at Kammok, I learned more about building community and a brand than any class could have taught me. I learned little shortcuts to running a business that no textbook teaches. I was exposed to the right tools that make running a business easier.

I’m going to say this because nobody else is. It’s okay to check your ego for a bit and work for someone else. Go ahead and learn from others experience.

One professor of mine put it this way, If you’re going to make mistakes, why not do it on someone else’s dime.

In my book, there is one valid excuse for not wanting to work for someone else. Time. Not having enough hours in the day to pursue your own venture and work for someone else. Unless you have your plan figured out and the time is now, go work for someone else. There will be a time when it’s 11 pm and there’s a critical deadline. You’ll be forced to make a choice, work on the business or work for your employer. But until then, it’s okay to learn by interning for someone else.

1. Get Organized
Let’s start with the least sexy lesson. Organization. At first, I thought it was ridiculous that such a small company took time to processes and playbooks for every little thing we did, but we did and over time I came to appreciate it.

Even for a company of one, it’s important to organize and build processes for how you handle situations. Create a system for storing passwords. Create a system for storing photos and videos. It’s worth taking time now so it doesn’t become a challenge later. These days I even standardize what goes in each pocket of my pants (keys, (front right), earbuds/misc (front left), phone(back right), wallet(back left)), in order to avoid having to remember if I have my keys or not.

It’s great when you need someone to grab a file off of your computer to be able to tell them exactly where it is even if you can’t see the screen or tell a friend where something in your apartment is without them having to dig around for it. The $30 you spend on containers and organization will pay for itself each time you don’t lose something you otherwise would have.

Randy Paush, a late Carnegie Mellon Professor, made the point that you have better things to do with your brain power than keep track of things. You may be smart enough to remember where you put something or how to complete a task, but you have much better things to do with your brainpower than remember these unimportant details.

2. Stories Do the Selling
Before working at Kammok, I couldn’t understand why people spent $100 on a hammock when you could buy a $50 hammock and use the other $50 to buy twenty-five pints of ice cream from the corner store instead.

But as I understood the story, people, and process of what went into the product, I started to buy into it. Turns out, so did the Kammok community. The story created a framework for why this hammock was better than others.

This is probably one of my more serious posts. I know that many people will not read until the end of this post, so before I truly begin I want to make it clear that I am not in favor of being easier on crime. Rather I believe that our current prison system is ineffective at actually rehabilitating prisoners. Secondly, I am not criticizing our judicial system. Though that is because to do so would be moot and it is much more effective to focus on areas which we can easily improve on.

Regardless of how we cut it, an astounding number of individuals go through our country’s prison system. Irrespective of how those individuals ended up in the prison system, we must recognize that a good number of them will be released at some point in time and they will return to society. Furthermore, many of these individuals will return to society not having been rehabilitated; they will be unprepared and incapable of living in regular society.

These are facts. You can go to whatever source you believe credible and these statements will be supported. Now for the bit where I interject my own humble opinion and attempt to connect the dots. Many of the former prisoners return to society incapable of providing for themselves, thus a fair number of the return to prison. In other words, we have  a high recidivism rate. While I cannot say with 100%certainty that the high recidivism rate is due to inadequate rehabilitation, it is certainly a major factor.

So, how do we solve this?

One solution is to change the judicial system so that it fairly and more effectively deals with criminals and offers a more expansive set of options. But of course that is quite unlikely. Our judicial system is an area of great stagnation, though considerably adaptive compared to our legislative system. Realistically the place to look for change is within the prison system itself.

Considering that prisons are often managed by private non-government organizations, we see a chance to reform how prisoners are treated within the prison system.

I make this call not as another social justice plea or idealist fantasy, but rather as a business proposition.

Let’s build private prisons that profit based off of their ability to rehabilitate the prisoners they manage. At the crux of it, why not align the incentives for prisons and their prisoners.

Part of the process would involved more expensive cognitive  therapy up-front. But once these individuals are past any physical or psychological issues they may have, they are now a blank slate with a great deal of potential. For the remainder of their sentence they are both an asset to the prison as well as an opportunity to gain skills that can be applied in the real world. Why not invest into treating their existing conditions and providing them with vocational training early in their prison career. Then having them gain experience and develop those skills while working for the prison. The profit earned during their work sentence is then dispersed in part upon their exit and then in part monthly as a basic welfare program. This would provide the prison management company a large source of capital which they could then manage and also profit off of.

Of course these are just ideas for a better prison system, one that fails to even address some of the fundamental problems inherent within our legal system. But keep in mind that any improvement, even a slight one would make a tremendous impact on the millions of individuals who are part of the prison industrial complex.

Let’s discuss, what are you’re thoughts? Comment below or shoot me an email! Either way I would love to hear what you think.