222 East College Avenue State College, Pa 16801 February 21, 2012 Ms.

Kim Hughes, PPL Corporation Recruiting Consultant 634 Salem Blvd. Berwick, PA 18603 Dear Ms. Hughes, I am writing in response to your advertisement for a field engineer inter in the work management group for PPL Corporation. I am a junior attending The Pennsylvania State University in the college of Engineering. I am seeking an internship position for the summer of 2012 and believe that my academic skills in Civil Engineering, along with my experience through hockey and Richland Properties, will qualify me for the position. My education at Penn State has allowed me to participate in hands on labs which give me a strong background in field work. Many of the labs consisted of group work and collaboration to complete lab reports and analyze data. In my Mechanics of Soils class I observed the failure strength of different types of concrete and analyzed the data plots. This allowed me to become very familiar with Microsoft Excel. Two and a half years of collegiate hockey has helped me develop good leadership skills by being a mentor for the freshman on the team. My time management skills continue to grow as I have to balance twenty hours a week of ice hockey, carry a sixteen-credit course load, and participate in extracurricular activities where I organized events for Engineering Week. Through my work experience with Richland Properties Incorporated, I was able to develop skills in project management by attending meetings where housing plans were reviewed and evaluated. I communicated with business associates of land developing companies about cost estimates of new housing plans. I also assisted a surveying engineer in property line stakeouts of buildings and houses. My enclosed resume gives an overview of my educational background and prior work experience. I look forward to speaking with you about this opportunity and am excited to see how it will help me improve my project management skills. I can be contacted through my email at gms5251@psu.edu or by phone at (412)-418-8520. I am eager to hear from you so we can personally discuss why I am the best fit for your program. Yours truly,

George Saad Enclosure

MEMORANDUM To: From: Subject: Date: Professor Alison Jaenicke George Saad Description of Rhetorical Choices for Job Application Package February 21, 2012

The purpose of this memo is to discuss the two positions I am applying for in my Job Application Package, analyze the different audiences, and explain my rhetorical choices used in my resume and cover letters. The first job ad that I will be discussing is the intern position at PPL Corporation. The second ad is also an intern position for the Georgia Department of Transportation. Each job will be broken up into the description of the job, analysis of the audience, and the rhetorical choices that I made. PPL Corporation Intern I have attached a document with the job ad for viewing. The PPL Corporations website can be accessed at http://www.pplweb.com/. Description The PPL Corporation internship position is for a student who is willing to work 40 hours a week and entails managing large capital projects from designing to planning and implementing. The headquarters of PPL is located in Allentown, Pa and I am seeking to fill the position in the office in Berwick, Pa. This job deals with cyber security upgrades, vent effluent radiation monitoring, and reactor recirculation pump and motor replacement. The job is a work-study program which allows students to become familiar with the corporate environment. The preferred qualifications require good organizational skills, communications skills, leadership qualities, and interest in project management. Audience Analysis PPL owns or controls 19,000 megawatts of generating capacity which provides electricity and natural gas to about ten million customers in the United States. Their goal is to take action in cutting emissions from their power plants and finding a cleaner way to supply electricity. I want to assist in accomplishing this goal and will stress that when addressing the audience. Since this ad was listed under internship/co-op a recruiter will most likely read my application. I searched the website to find the head recruiting consultant because this is the audience I am targeting. The job ad did include the city and area code of the address but I had to search the website for the full address. PPLs website was not very organized making me think that the audience I would be addressing is a les s formal one. Also the bland grey colors in the website gave me a more laid back approach to addressing the audience. Recruiters are usually laid back but are looking for a good first impression to be made. Rhetorical Choices There were many things I fixed on my resume and cover letter to appeal to the recruiters at PPL Corporation. I tailored my resume to appeal to the inter position for PPL Corporation. First, I changed my objective to state I wanted a job in Civil Engineering with a focus in project management. Next I placed courses that specifically applied to this job ad from left to right in my relevant courses section.

The courses that showed my lab experience and project management skills were Mechanics of Soils and Project Management. I placed my experience with the Penn State Hockey Team at the top of my Leadership/Activities section because they are interested in good leadership skills. I placed hockey in this spot on the page because I wanted it to be the first thing the company noticed. Leadership is an important aspect of project management and by being a mentor on the team, along with winning the sportsmanship award, proves I set a good example for others. Then I included that I coordinated and obstacle course during Engineering Week to show that I have leadership qualities that they are looking for. Finally, I chose to leave in my grades from high school in my resume because I maintained a 4.0 GPA. The ad says they do not take candidates with a GPA lower than a 3.2 GPA which is what I currently have so I thought including the consistency of a 4.0 in high school would help. When writing my cover letter I continued to stress on my experience in hands on field work along with my organizational skills since these were preferred in the job description. I included how I have good time management by balancing school work and a sport at the same time. This proves I can handle a large work load such as managing a project. In the work experience section I discussed how I shadowed important business meetings to observe how cost estimates were made showing my interest in project management. Georgia DOT Intern This ad is also attached to the document and more information can be found on the Georgia DOT website at http://www.dot.state.ga.us/Pages/default.aspx. Description Georgia Department of Transportation makes it their duty to make sure the roads their citizens are driving on are safe. Georgia DOT is offering an internship program for a student to mainly work on highways and transportation. The job will entail roadway design and construction work and my experience in these fields make me a great candidate. Audience Analysis Georgia Department of Transportation is a government based corporation that is attracting many of people in the sense of job security. Government officials will be supervising the tasks performed by employees to make sure things are done right by law and by a specific building code. A government based corporation is expected to run things on a strict regime with no room for error. Since this job seemed to be much more formal than the PPL corporation ad, I decided to contact the Director of Engineering. The website is very structured and gives the impression that they want experienced workers who know what they are doing. This is why I put a lot of emphasis on my background knowledge of transportation in my cover letter. Rhetorical Choices In the intro of my cover letter to Georgia DOT I kept my focus mainly on my experience in road design because this is what the Director is going to be looking for. This is why I decided to keep my hockey experience out of this cover letter. The first thing I mention in my first paragraph is the fact that I have experience in CAD which is a program used to design layouts of roadways and bridges. I also mention that I am currently taking a transportation class which has prepared me for the job. In my work experience I explain how I have observed residential housing plans being developed. This proves to Mr. McMurry that I not only understand the highway/interstate aspect of transportation but also how the local area roadways work. Finally, I address the fact that I have never had an out of state job and I would like to see how a job under the government operates compared to a job with a private owner.

Summary My leadership skills were stressed in the cover letter to PPL Corporation while my design experience was the main focus in the cover letter to Georgia DOT. I was much more formal in the cover letter to Georgia DOT compared to the laid back approach I took with PPL Corporation. Each ad was directed toward two different audiences and highlighted different skills that I portray.