Sample cover letter for Internship position at Kapor Center

I am committed to the potential of technology to transform the way we teach and learn and I am emboldened by the Kapor Center's commitment to social impact through entrepreneurship.

Education technology strives to contribute to education by developing alternatives and complements to the classroom. Classrooms are evermore evolving to better teach students. The current education technology industry reminds me of the education reformer Horace Mann; he changed the way America thought about education and the way education looked in every classroom.

I intend to study computer science and mathematical modeling in concert to understand the mechanisms that I hope will become the foundation for education. Big data presents an opportunity to ask questions about the way the world works. In “Tipping Points, Bandwagons and Cascades: From Individual Behavior to Social Dynamics,” I explored the predictive power Twitter as an information market through web-scraping and the effect of perceived neighborhood size on racial segregation through agent-based modeling. These questions and the mechanisms used to examine them excite me about the wealth of information and insight that lies just beneath the numbers.

While learning is specific to individuals, computer science is the driving force behind tailoring the learning process to be more efficient and effective. My internship experience at LearnBop, an online platform that adapts to student learning in mathematics, demonstrated the strides technology is making toward achieving academic and economic equality of opportunity in the classroom. While at LearnBop, I focused on advertising a summer math review program for middle-schoolers by working with libraries, PTAs, and other educational organizations; I developed flyers, landing pages, and email marketing materials as well as measured their effectiveness. I continue to develop the skill of deliberate, precise content creation through my community management internship with Federal Student Aid in the Department of Education.

Working in the dynamic, challenging setting of a startup is intoxicating. Both LearnBop and Federal Student Aid provided intimate working environments where I was asked to tackle large problems with little explicit guidance. MPowered at the University of Michigan has provided an opportunity for me to both expose other students to the way of thinking that defines startups and for me to encourage them to embrace it.

rEDesign further directs my energy towards education. As an organization, we promote education reform through innovation and action as college students. I also explored the conviction that the socio-economic problem that is education as best addressed through conversation and unconventional thinking in the class “Critical Issues in Education” where I learned to solve problems through asking questions. I never tire of asking questions; I am always hungry; and I do not settle for being content. Education gives me an impulsive sense of urgency and the Kapor Center shares my confidence in technology to be the driving force behind fostering the growth of the kinds of students who will change our world.