Linking back to vacation scheme in covering letter?

[theintellectualpropertygirl]

Currently writing a covering letter. I find myself every few sentences saying something like '...and I want to explore this during the scheme' or 'this is why I want to do the scheme'... Feels like I am repeating myself and wasting words but if I don't say it I feel a bit like I'm just listing a bunch of facts that don't really have a clear relevance to the application (even though it should be fairly easy to infer). Does anyone have any advice here? Should you keep linking back to the scheme? If so, is there a less boring way to do it? Thanks so much!

 

[Andrei Radu]

Currently writing a covering letter. I find myself every few sentences saying something like '...and I want to explore this during the scheme' or 'this is why I want to do the scheme'... Feels like I am repeating myself and wasting words but if I don't say it I feel a bit like I'm just listing a bunch of facts that don't really have a clear relevance to the application (even though it should be fairly easy to infer). Does anyone have any advice here? Should you keep linking back to the scheme? If so, is there a less boring way to do it? Thanks so much!

The way I see it, when discussing your interest in the firm in a cover letter, you do not need to explicitly link features of the firm you find attractive to opportunities you would have in the Vacation Scheme itself. Instead, what I ended up doing in my cover letters (and what I know quite a number of other successful candidates have done in theirs) was to simply express an interest in those features of the firm in and of themselves (eg. "I am applying to X firm because of its strengths in M&A and PE, as these are the practices I am most interested in."). Thus, we would talk from the perspective of a prospective trainee rather than that of a prospective vacation scheme attended.

To the extent any recruiter would expect the latter, I still think this would likely not be a major issue, as the link between there being a feature of the firm which makes it an attractive place for your TC and you wanting to explore it in the VS is a clear and obvious one. As such, recruiters would not generally expect you to waste word count by repeating the same line over and over again even when the meaning of your points would be clear without it.