Sample cover letter for Full Time position at American Express

Dear Sir/Madam,

I would like to join American Express in the role of Strategic Planning Group Graduate Analyst.

I am very interested in finance and business and have long taken an interest in the current events, and as a result believe I have excellent commercial awareness. I have enjoyed learning more throughout my master's degree in Accounting, Finance and Management and I would love the opportunity to develop my business and leadership skills with American Express.

I am excellent at coming up with solutions to challenges, something I believe I have demonstrated throughout my university career. In the final year of my Chemistry degree I carried out an independent research project which I then wrote my dissertation on. I had to design and plan my own experiment and when things frequently did not go to plan, I had to use my knowledge of chemistry to think about why and try to design my experiment so that it would work better. In the end my experiment worked and I gained 67% overall for my project.

I have a very analytical mind and have experience of analysing both scientific and financial data and drawing meaningful conclusions. My most recent dissertation was titled 'The Determinants of a Firm's Borrowing Source: The Impact of the Global Financial Crisis' and focused on how companies' debt structure was linked to their firm characteristics and whether firms significantly changed their debt structure in the years after the financial crisis of 2008 hit. I used pre-existing theories of debt structure to design regressions and used the statistical software Stata to run them.

Yours faithfully,