CWP: The Politics of Poetics (Fall 2024): Researching the Job Letter

Finding jobs and internships can be a challenge, since this information is constantly changing and is not consolidated into a single source.  There are a number of ways to find internships and jobs.  For your cover letter assignment, we recommend beginning by signing up for a Penn Handshake Account. 

Then commence searching the keywords you have developed in class.  Use these keywords to search for positions as wel as scan advertisements and announcements.  You can also scan the “Writing-Related Internships” listed in your Course Canvas site under the tab of “Cover Letter.”

From here you have a great many sites to search: 

• Check out internship and fellowship listings from the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships

• Click on the "Information for Students" under a Virtual Career Fair that Penn is facilitating this semester. Browse the list of companies, organizations, and institutions, go to their websites, and locate internships and summer positions. 

• In addition to Handshake, Penn Career Services also provides links to GameJobHunter (for video game industry) and AdAge (for advertising industry). Select one of those databases to search for opportunities. 

• Spend time looking at postings on a website for a company or organization in your home town or a place you’d like to be or plan to be this summer. For example, let’s say you intend to be in Philadelphia this summer, and you are interested in working for WHYY. When you go to WHYY’s website, however, you don’t see any internships listed. Don’t stop there.  Search on Google for “WHYY, Internships” and you will locate their internships. Be tenacious and try a few different search terms to identify jobs and internships if they don’t show up on an organization’s website. 

• Some departments at Penn maintain lists of past internships of alums. For example, Penn History and Sociology of Science maintains a listing here. 

• Professional associations also sometimes maintain lists of internships. For example, the American Association of Medical Colleges maintains a listing of summer undergraduate research programs here. 

• Do a location-based search using Indeed.com or Monster.com or even Google.com.