cover letters and resumes

though i love the place i work at and the people, the hours are not enough. i've always been looking for a second job though not always actively going after it. a lot of the places i've applied to were retailers. not a place i want to go back to at all but i had no choice with my work experience.

only recently did it occur to me that i now have enough experience and something to offer to even write a cover letter. when you have very little work experience your cover letters just ends up repeating your resume which is not what you're supposed to do. that was a part of my problem in the past. so here i am. i just created a more professional email address and spent a few days trying to come up with a stand out cover letter. the cover letter itself i wrote in the body of the message.  i finally finished it. i test sent it to myself more than a few dozen times until hotmail told me i had reached my limit for emails sent in a day (never even knew there was a limit) but i fixed that by giving them my phone number which i never wanted to do (they promised not to give it away to third parties). copying and pasting from word document is a big disaster--everything becomes double spaced once it's sent! for my resume, i just sent it as an attachment.

so i just sent it in. in two weeks i will call the hiring person. also nerve wracking. then it's just waiting. hopefully something will open up in the future and i will come to mind.

i have a few more places i want to send it to, too. once all that's done, time to go back to studying for the graduate exam.

american studies

throughout my graduate school research of schools in europe, i came across an interesting program of study:  american studies. it's so odd, from an american perspective, to see it being offered. (in the u.s., a select number of schools also offer american studies which i was completely unaware of...)

today as i was looking into the university of utrecht i came across their american studies masters program. they have a school blog as well as a blog of one of the students. most of the students who contribute to the school's blog have had an internship in the u.s. in different sectors. it's interesting to see what career paths these students are pursuing as the first question that came to mind was what kind of career does one go into with a degree in american studies? for american students with a u.s. history degree it was always thought that there were only a few career paths: politics and academia. these european students, however, seem to have figured it out and are going into all these different areas that i would have never thought of.

reading the one blog that belongs to one of their most recent graduates, i learned what students of an american studies major call themselves (or at least this girl considers herself): an americanist.

career-update

i realized for my work in the nonprofit sector, my place is in admin.  I would like to work in HQ as opposed to working in the field (though i would like to be able to go out to the field, too). i came upon this conclusion based on my current job and from what i have envisioned for myself for the longest time. my current job is doing data entry. before i got this job i used to think data entry as a boring job. it might be if i only had to work with numbers. however, the data i work with is non-numeric. i can actually make sense of it, i know what it deals with, i can see how it helps the nonprofit. it is interesting to me. as far as what i envisioned, i always wanted to work and live abroad--in europe. so i put these two things together and that is where i'm at now. it does affect my school choices a bit. i will still have to study international development in some way but it might be as a concentration instead of the major. i might be going into nonprofit management (though i do not intend to manage a nonprofit - still working it out).

another thing i realized is that if i do my graduate work at a part-time schedule, it will take me 3-4 years to finish(!) the flip side is that it will give me more time to intern and i will have enough professional experience by the time i graduate to find a good job. not a bad trade-off.

summer tracklist

don't want to go to sleep though i am tired. loving the songs that pandora is playing for me on my edward sharpe & the magnificent zeros station.

fresh feeling, the eels
home, edward sharpe & the magnificent zeros
two weeks (radio mix), grizzly bear
dream a little dream of me, the mamas and the papas
vinca rosea (instrumental), mf doom
basic space, the xx
40 day dream, edward sharpe & the magnificent zeros
black & blue, miike snow
heartbreaker, mstrcrft
ghostwriter, rjd2