Cover Letter Writing Project

This activity is used in a field camp course at California State University Long Beach. The class is taken mostly by seniors and a few juniors majoring in Geology and/or Earth Systems.

No specific skills or concepts besides basic writing are required for this activity.

This activity is scaffolded across the entirety of a four-week class. The students slowly work on the assignment on their own time throughout the week, and each week has a specific deliverable or exercise(s) (for example an outline draft due, peer feedback due, a group discussion). The final draft of the cover letter is due on the last day of class.

Students learn about what makes a good cover letter and produce a polished cover letter draft that, ideally, can be used in the future with minor changes for a specific job application.

critical self-evaluation and synthesis of skills, ideals, and goals.

self-advocating, written communication, self-reflection, giving and receiving feedback

This activity begins with a short lecture and discussion about the various skills the students have developed in their time at school.
Students are encouraged to use their field/lab notebooks or a separate notebook for a bit of journaling each morning and evening. In the morning, they should take two minutes to think about and write down specific goals/objectives they may have for building skills that day. In the evening, they review their day and take 5-10 minutes to reflect on if they met their goals, what skills they used/developed, and write down any examples.
They are given an assignment handout (attached here) that describes the activity, gives testimonials from employers about how cover letters are used in the hiring process, provides several current job postings for students to choose from, and has a guide to help students begin to outline their cover letters.
In week one, the students decide which job application they will write their cover letter for and create an outline using the guide on the last page of the assignment document.
In week two, they complete the first draft of their cover letter.
During week three, they share their cover letters with 2-3 peers and give/receive individual feedback. The instructor also leads a group discussion to go over other good tips and hear examples or good ideas or questions from the entire class.
In the fourth week, the students write a final draft of their cover letter using the feedback they received and ideas shared during the group discussion.
Cover Letter Assignment Guide (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 39kB Jun27 25)
Future of Undergraduate Geoscience Education Report (Acrobat (PDF) 9.9MB Jun27 25)
Samples of Cover Letters (Acrobat (PDF) 275kB Jun27 25)

To initiate the first discussion about skills, start with a broad question to the students asking them to "shout out" examples of the skills they have and have gained in their time as students. This can be entirely oral or can be written on a board or a digital document to capture and remember the full list. From there the instructor should point out that some of the skills fall into categories that are very specific to geology, others are more broadly scientific skills, and others are universal or transferable skills. The important thing to point out here is that even though they are Earth Science students, employers value the universal and scientific skills just as much if not more than the geology specific skills (see the Vision and Change report Mosher et al., 2021).
If you want to incorporate the daily goals and reflection journaling into your class, it is most useful to assign a specific time for this task and have everyone complete it at the same time. For example, right before we leave for the field every morning we gather at a central place in camp and the students are given 5 minutes to add to their notebooks. Then once we get back to the cars after working in the field all day, the students are reminded to reflect and given 5-10 minutes to do that before we head back to camp. This was a suggestion from some students in previous iterations of the course/activity, who said they were often forgetting to do the reflections but really wanted to. Building in the time for it and having everyone participate in the activity at the same time is very effective.
For the week three peer review, the groups are given each other's letters a few days before the scheduled group discussion and all group members are supposed to read and make notes/feedback on their peers' letters before the group discussion day. On the day of the group discussion the small peer groups get together first and take ~45 minutes to discuss their thoughts, give feedback, and ask questions. Then the entire class comes together, and the instructor can initiate the discussion with prompts like "what were some positive/awesome things you saw in the cover letters", or "what was helpful about the peer review exercise", and then move into lingering questions from the students. Students often want to ask how to word certain things and having the whole group there often prompts the students to give ideas and suggestions on wording. It is a very fun, enlightening, and inspiring discussion.

This activity is graded solely on participation. The quality and/or content of the cover letters is not graded, although I do offer to provide more specific feedback on the individual cover letters if individuals request it either for this activity or if they find a job that they want to apply for using this drafted cover letter as a starting point.