At Truscott Rossman we pride ourselves on having a pretty good internship program. Our interns do more than just fetch coffee, file paperwork and answer phones (in fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever asked an intern to bring me coffee). We try to make sure our interns have real client work and get experience executing projects, which is why we tend to get a lot of resumes every year.

We also delete a lot of resumes every year. So in the interest of helping interns get hired and in the interest of easing the workload of the folks at TR who review internship requests, here are a few tips of what not to do when applying for an internship. Good luck in your internship hunt!  🙂

1. Don’t bother sending a cover letter
Resumes are helpful – they give a quick overview of a candidate’s relevant experience. What’s even more helpful is knowing whether a candidate can write, why they’re interested in our firm and what they hope to get out of interning with us. It’s pretty hard to learn that from an email that says “please consider me for an internship with your company.”

2. Address Your Email as “To Who it May Concern” 
When you start an email or cover letter like this it’s an immediate deletion of the email. If the demonstration of poor grammar – it should be “to whom” – isn’t enough, the intern candidate couldn’t even bother to find out who would be hiring them. Poor writing skills and lazy. Sounds like a winner to me.

3. Don’t Google Your Own Name
Whatever your resume and cover letter don’t say about a candidate I’m sure I can find on Google. This includes Facebook photos and inappropriate Tweets from the 12 hour bar crawl. Don’t get me wrong, interns are college students and should be out having a good time, but demonstrating a little common sense is important – especially in an age when firms have lost clients over inappropriate social media posts.

4. Forget About the Follow Up
When the decision to hire an intern is split between two or three candidates, the easy way to cross someone off the list is by who fails to follow up with a thank you note or, if we haven’t gotten back to you within a week, a call to find out where the hiring process stands. That’s a great way to show you’re not as interested in the internship as the other candidates and possibly can’t be counted on to follow through on assignments.

5. Don’t Visit Our Website
Even if a candidate makes it to the interview, a sure way to get rejected is to not bother to learn about our firm, our clients and our specialties. What’s more, now that this blog post is online there’s really no excuse not to put together a stellar internship application and hit the ball out of the park, right?