A Hermit's Cave

I was trained in the dark arts of the cover letter by my mother, who is a hiring manager. And her training has paid off: I've been consistently told my cover letters are excellent. Let me pass on the wisdom.

The job of a cover letter is to give a prospective employer strictly more information than is on the resume. This is where you take the resume contents and put them into context. You look at the job requirements (you are looking at the job requirements before applying, right?) and look at your resume and ask the question (in your head) "why would a person think this candidate would be good for this job?" and your cover letter is the answer to that question. If you don't answer that question, the hiring manager is going to have to do it themselves, and you have way more information to work with than they do.

This is especially important if you're moving from one industry to another, because then the relevant connections aren't obvious. It's also very important if you're overqualified, because then you can use the letter to say "I know it looks like this job would be too entry-level for me, but I'm interested to pursue it for reasons x, y, and z". You can also use this space to explain away something that might otherwise be disqualifying, like job-hopping or a long break in employment. The tone to strike here is always matter-of-fact and constrained to topic - don't go into detail about health stuff or personal tragedy, just tell them what they need to hear: that this period of your resume was affected by [bad thing] but that it's now in the past and you're looking forward to the next chapter. Remember, one of the things they're trying to learn is whether you'd be content in this role, or whether you'd be miserable and leave after 2 months, which would force them to do all the work of hiring again. You're trying to establish that you will fit right in and not cause problems. Knowing what drew you to this job in particular (and don't just say 'money', that's true for everyone) helps with that.

If you don't know how to write a cover letter, here's a very basic template:

Start: letter-style salutation. If you don't know who the hiring manager is, "hiring team" or similar is fine.

Introduction paragraph: who are you, what job this is, why you are interested in it

Paragraph 1: take one part of the job description and explain how your previous experience and skills would make you good at this aspect of the position you are applying for. This should involve a brief description of what you have done previously (in a job, in education, in volunteer work, etc.), not belaboring the point, and then how those skills apply. Talk a little about how those skills have helped you in a previous position while explaining those duties. This is also where you would explain if you have transferrable skills! Say you haven't worked in this exact field before, but you have skills (so-called hard skills OR soft skills) that apply to this position. This is where you convince the hiring team that these skills apply to what you are applying for.

Paragraph 2: basically the same as Paragraph 1, but with a different part of the job description. Try for something with a different skillset.

Paragraph 3: same as above. You don't need as many as three paragraphs. You can have as few as one. It all depends on the job and how much you have to say about it.

Closing paragraph: Conclude as to why you would be a good fit for the job. Thank the hiring team for considering you and re-emphasize why you want to work there. Sum yourself up in a punchy one-sentence conclusion. Sign off like a letter.

This should all be about a page of text, as the OP mentioned. It's not rehashing your resume, but explaining those skills, elaborating on them, and convincing the person or people reading these letters that you should be interviewed because you are a good fit. (Don't say that in so many words -- "I would be a good fit because...." but rather do it professionally, like "I would bring my passion for and previously strong results in teen literacy to [teen literacy librarian role]")

It's also okay to write a few basic templates for yourself! Just be very very careful to tailor them to each position, and don't accidentally send the template itself or the exact same cover letter to multiple places (or worse, the same place multiple times). (When I was most recently job hunting I accidentally sent a cover letter with the name of a different place because I copy/pasted and didn't proofread closely enough..... don't be me LMAO)

Voyager had many close calls with the Alpha Quadrant, but most were false opportunities or misunderstandings. (The micro wormhole across time, the telepathic pitcher plant, the planet whose mantle allowed long range transport). One that absolutely was NOT a false opportunity or misunderstanding was the episode “False Profits” in season 3. The wormhole was undeniably to the Alpha Quadrant, and the issue was that the escaped Ferengi collapsed it before Voyager could enter it.

If Admiral Janeway were just looking for the fastest way home, the most elegant solution would have been to return to this episode and lay some extra smackdown on the Ferengi to render them unable to escape to their shuttle, and they would never emit the graviton pulse that destabilized the wormhole. Instead, she elected for maximum smackdown on the Borg transwarp hub. Handwaving away that if she came back to season 3, the rest of the show would not have happened, here’s my list of reasons why she wouldn’t do that:

1. False Profits took place in 2373. The Dominion War ended in 2375. To prevent her Maquis crew from being slaughtered and her Starfleet crew from being sent to the front lines and also likely decimated, they should come back after the end of the war.

2. Seven of Nine had not yet been freed from the Collective. She personally faced off against the Borg for Seven too many times to never save her. (Also, choose your flavor of Captain/mentor/lover/mother, but Admiral Janeway came back after Seven becoming her own person and before Seven marrying Chakotay for a REASON.)

3. Admiral Janeway’s journey was motivated by a great deal of self-loathing and guilt. To avoid Time Police prosecution, or worse, someone ‘correcting’ her timeline, a suicide mission was always going to be ideal for her.

4. Destroying the transwarp hub also destroyed an outlet that was in the heart of the Federation and certainly would have been the next catastrophe after the Dominion War if the Borg had popped out right outside Earth. She crippled the Borg’s expansion into the Alpha Quadrant and could justify that action by saving billions of lives.

5. personal vendetta against the Borg Queen. What a move, to tenderly look into your deepest enemy’s eyes as she assimilates you and then you both blow up. Stunning. No notes.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

the opening is rad as fuck fight me

T'Pol is so hot ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohm

July 22, 2016 was ten years ago?? That can't be right...

Redraw of that scene from the deadly years (i think it’s from that one)