Here are my top three skills to demonstrate why you want to work with me.
Initiative
I get shit done, whether it’s solving business’ problems or writing engaging content. While planning is essential, I jump to solve problems. When I was training at Pepsi, I noticed several pricing discrepancies in the software. When I asked my trainer about it, she shrugged and told me that it wasn’t her job. So I sought out a vending supervisor who pointed me to the VP of Vending, to whom I gave a brief and explained my concern. He told me this was a recurring problem and that the last two tasked to handle this problem had quit because they had to analyze contracts with more than 3,000 businesses. Two weeks after entering the company I dove headfirst into the vending supply chain and more than 2,500 pages of paperwork to find a solution.
Within a month I worked out a system to solve the pricing problem and discovered how much it had cost the company: more than $75,000 per year. Before I had a nameplate on my cubicle, I was solving problems that had plagued the company’s Vice Presidents for more than ten years.
Writing
When I first began writing I discovered it was the only way to observe how someone else thinks. I started writing for three newspapers and then I joined the Hillsdale Collegian, ranked the 5th-best college newspaper in the U.S by the Princeton Review in 2019. As an assistant editor, I managed 15 writers. I forged my style from Hunter S. Thompson, George Orwell, and William Zinsser, and I wrote the all-time most-read opinion piece for the paper.
I interned for Red Alert Politics, which is now the Washington Examiner in Washington, D.C. I wrote to a monthly audience of 500,000 and covered topics such as student loan debt, housing costs, and the job market. I dug up sources to write engaging, targeted content and I earned the 5th most-read writer slot out of more than 50 writers during my internship.
The summer after I graduated I interned with Openthebooks.com auditing government spending. I researched high school spending in Texas, a project that required analyzing data sets as large as 600,000 lines. I wrote about school district debt (one district racked up $4.8 billion) and teacher pension funds, topics that usually cause reader’s eyes to glaze over, but I told stories how this affects people in everyday life. This article was Openthebooks’ 3rd all-time most-read article, which was published in Forbes.com.
Problem Solving
I love thinking outside the box and taking new approaches to old problems.
When I was an assistant editor at the Collegian, we ran into problems finding the time for 17 people to meet. Between athletes, musicians, and Greek life, people always missed the meeting and then fell behind with assignments. The meetings we had often dragged on and were hijacked with other topics. So my editors and I met and decided to replace our meetings with Slack.
Everyone’s assignments were clearly labeled and scheduling was no longer an issue. On deadline night we set clear expectations for when stories were due and we were always the first section out the door at 9 P.M. while others worked until 2 A.M., minutes before the papers were printed.
When I worked on a farm, I had to clean ten ponds every summer because organic material contaminated the water and adsorbed oxygen, which would eventually kill the fish. The ponds were stocked with various kinds of fish so pro-fisherman could practice fishing before competitions. The job wasn’t glamorous; I spent hours chest-deep in pond water, raking out grass, weeds, and leaves. During one of my breaks, I decided there had to be an easier way, so I plunged into internet farmer forums and found a solution: grass carp, a herbivore fish that eats organic material in ponds. I drove to the nearest fish hatchery, bought ten grass carp, and released them into the ponds. Within a month they were clean, and the fishermen got experience pulling in bigger fish (carp can grow up to three feet).
Although these are my top skills, I’m working to raise others up to par. I’m learning google analytics, Spanish, and financial operations to expand my skill set. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.