Friday, October 29, 2010

A Piece of Advice for Those of You Looking for Jobs:

Make sure you spell the name of your potential employer correctly on the cover letter.

Today, after (another long) job search, I found a posting for a Reading Instructor at a school I thought I had applied to. When I had originally applied to this school and never heard back from them, I got pretty down. I knew some people who taught there, who I believed I was more competent than when it came to teaching. After digging up the cover letter I had sent this school back in July, I noticed that I had misspelled the school's name, which knocked me down from my previously situated position atop the pedestal of bitterness. No wonder I never heard back from that school.

Rendered completely embarrassed by the situation, I deleted the old cover letter from my hard drive and continued browsing job listings. I finished the search, applied for a position at Rasmussen in Brooklyn Park and filled out a questionnaire to become a volunteer with the Minnesota Literacy Council, then I went through the bookmarked pages to delete expired job listings. That's when I came across the new listing for the Reading Instructor at the school I thought I had applied to again. This time, however, I noticed that the listing wasn't for the same school--the first one was a community college, this one was a technical college; they had different addresses and contact info--so I applied for the position.

And you better believe I proofread every application material I wrote and filled out. Let's hope the outcome is (a lot) better this time.

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