Advertising Your Availability

Coming from several years of prior internship experience, my resume had been revised again and again to a fine point. During my high school years I received assistance from my father who was also instrumental in helping me find suitable internships. In fact, I used my father’s own professional business resume as a template for my own. As my education and experience furthered and I entered college, I started to go about finding internships on my own and preparing my resume following examples I had found online as well as through advise I had received from professors. One course offered at JMU in particular, Introduction to Technical Science and Communication (TSC 210), became extremely helpful. The course book showed the different styles of resume while the instructor of the course, Mark Denoble, suggested many adjustments to my resume which I had always thought was very solid.

Finding Out About Job Openings

Upon the end of my sophomore year in college I found myself in the awkward position of not having a summer job or internship lined up beforehand. Given that many companies look to fill their open internship positions with eligible students before the onset of summer, I was nervous about the possibility of not finding an internship at all. Starting on my first day home from JMU I sought to find a position as quickly as possible. I made use of a couple of services, including Headhunter.net. To this day I have yet to receive any feedback from a single interested party through the service. In fact, I found my future internship through one of the more simple services that can be used for finding job openings – the online classified section on The Washington Post website.

To my surprise, the Advanced Operations and Technology department at DynCorp was offering a single opening for a qualified intern. The interesting aspect of this find was that I had worked for DynCorp the previous summer, but at an off-site location in Springfield, VA for a Department of Defense contract. I had found this previous internship to be very much not to my liking; therefore I was more than a little apprehensive about contacting DynCorp again. Luckily, the open position was at the company’s corporate headquarters in Reston, VA, and therefore assured me that the position would be unlike my previous experience.

Landing the Job

I contacted the prospective employer via email immediately upon making the find on The Washington Post website. I first polished my resume and checked for any errors or omissions and updated my contact information to reflect my phone number at my parent’s home in Chantilly, VA. I then attached the resume to the email and sent it to the email address provided in the online classified listing. Since this was my first time using email as a means for applying for a job, I was unsure of how quickly I would hear from DynCorp, if at all – thus, I continued to look for an internship while I waited for a reply. Very much to my surprise, however, I received a reply from DynCorp the very next day. It turned out that the AOT department had interviewed a number of candidates and my submission had reached them just in time, or so I was told from a Human Resources employee. The HR representative and I had lined up an interview with a member of the AOT department within a few minutes.

The interview itself went very smoothly. The interviewer was a tall, quiet veteran of the AOT department named Thinh Van. He explained the nature of the position and his own role in my internship, if I should be chosen for the position. The overall interview experience went better than others I had had in the past and went very smoothly. I was prepared to explain the knowledge I had been learning through the Computer Science department at JMU. Most of all, I emphasized my several years of previous internship experience, hoping that it would off-set any sort of requirement Thinh was looking for that I did not meet. The one aspect I felt unprepared for was the answering of questions of personal nature, such as the kind of activities I was involved in and the sorts of things I enjoyed. As I stumbled to answer his questions, he mentioned that understanding a person’s background, such as likes and dislikes, is important in finding a suitable employee to fill any position.