Somebody else may be reading this right now. Somebody not from around here. Somebody special may be reading this little blog entry, reading every word I write.

Yes, dear reader. My potential employers may be reading this. Why? Because I included one of my blog entries in my application. Egads!

I’ve been spending every second since I hit the “send” button and shot my application off into cyberspace praying to every single deity anyone has ever worshiped EVER to get me this job. You see, I recently sent out an application to intern with a very large, very well-known online news site. Part of the application was to include a couple writing samples. I spent the majority of my application time poring through my outbox and my hard drive (which, if you remember, was decimated a while ago), trying to find something—ANYTHING—that may give me a leg up. What pieces, I asked myself, would best describe me and reflect my talents? Turns out that was a hard question to answer.

Since this internship was for a position that depended on being Internet savvy, I decided that a blog post (from this site) would be a good idea. It shows that I can at least type and upload something to the web, right? But it also shows that I have experience blogging and communicating through the Internet; that I’m a hip young cool cat with e-know-how and other things grownups don’t understand (some of them think that the web is a series of tubes). I just picked the blog post of mine that sounded the best and that I was most proud of.

But I wanted to show something else—some of my more serious, academic writing. I wanted to prove that not only could I wax poetic about the woes of internship hunting, but that I could wax poetic about Nietzsche and not sound like a complete moron. I decided to send an essay I write for a take-home final in one of my politics classes last year, where I had to apply Nietzschean good/evil dichotomy to US policy in the past decade. That’s quite a prompt, right? You bust that out at a party—“Oh yeah, I was just thinking about the Nietzschean good/evil dichotomy in today’s culture, it’s crazy how well it works, isn’t it?”—and you’re the coolest cat in all of North Quad. But not only did this essay of mine sound smart, it was smart. It was well-written, thoughtful, and funny without being annoying. I was proud of it, and I still am.

The pieces I ended up submitting may not have proved my worth as a human being (what pieces could?) but did show off my marketable skills: my attention to detail, writing abilities, research abilities, and sense of humor. I was going about the entire process in the wrong way, looking for some magic paper that showed off my beautiful soul to internship selection committees everywhere. Instead, my writing samples bolstered my resume and proved that I could actually act as a valuable assent to any company. So now… let’s just hope I get the position!