Feb. 24, 2017
To Whom It May Concern:
I am writing to apply for your 2017 undergraduate internship in digital media and marketing strategies. I am a junior at Yale University majoring in history, and I hope you will agree that my work ethic, lack of self-esteem, pathological need for praise, astonishing insecurity about every goddamn facet of my persona and collaborative style make me an ideal candidate for this position.
My employment history speaks to my strengths as a candidate. Throughout high school, I worked as a cashier at a local supermarket. While this may not carry the prestige of a high-powered finance internship, I believe it helped me learn the value of terror, specifically the highly specific terror of ending up like the old lady with no teeth demanding that cashiers triple-bag her single orange, a loveless crone who lashes out at others for comfort. The summer of 2015 brought me back to my hometown for an internship at a local consulting firm. Here, I developed a profound self-loathing, cultivated the inability to see any intrinsic value in myself and learned how to operate the postal scale. Finally, last summer, I left Minnesota behind and worked for a digital media group in New York City, where I spent my evenings in a fetal position in a studio apartment, convulsing in fits of despair and feeling the sort of terrible loneliness I’d once naively romanticized, and also I was very punctual.
Moreover, my extracurricular activities in college speak to my attention to detail and utter lack of self-actualization. As a member of the creative writing community on campus, I put thinly veiled versions of my own life in front of my peers just to see my own failings called “puerile” and “woefully inauthentic” by a group of peers whose eyes I can never bring myself to meet afterwards; as a writer for the Yale Daily News, I hide my fear of inferiority behind a crushing wall of polysyllabic words and “Iliad” references; and working in Yale’s theater community, I have developed an excellent sense of logistics.
My unique talents translate perfectly to your workplace. Because I fear I have no personality of my own, I’m incredibly adaptive; whatever the culture of the office, I’ll conform to it, sacrificing my opinions, personality and sense of humor along the way. My crippling need for approval means that I’ll work untenable hours to finish a project, no matter how trivial it might be. My hatred of everything I am means that I’m the kind of person who will try anything as long as there’s the slightest glimmer of chance that it’ll mean I don’t have to think about the fact that I’m me for even a moment or two. Finally, I am proficient in the entire Microsoft Office suite of applications.
In sum, I have a fucking enormous hole in the very center of my being, a gaping Lusitania-sized void where I think the things I like about myself should be. I have tried to fill that hole with love, lust, philosophy, literature, music, posing as cool, appreciating nature, disaffection and so many other things, and yet it just keeps growing and growing and GROWING and I worry that I will never be happy and I will never be loved and I will never be worthwhile and I will always be nothing more than this goddamn hideous sack of flesh, and I would like nothing more than to try and fill that hideous chasm with this ever-so-brief flicker of temporary employment.
My resume is attached, I am so goddamn lonely and I look forward to hearing from you!
Sincerely,
Contact Micah Osler at micah.osler@yale.edu .