I just wanted to share a cover letter that I wrote for my application to be a part of the Fox School of Business College Council of Presidents.  This is by far one of the best cover letters I have ever written; it’s passionate and powerful.  One of my colleagues recently found it laying around in our office and  I am finding it to be healthy reminder of why I am doing all of this extra work.

Theresa Jenkins and Kevin Bradley,

Thank you for your consideration thus far, I am interested in applying for President of College Council’s Executive Committee.

I am the current Secretary of AMIS’ Executive Board. Throughout my time with this organization I have been to a number of networking events, professional development events, workshops, and guest speakers. The organization has been critical to my development within the business school and I have developed a strong interest in seeing that my peers have access to similar opportunities.

Coming from the background of being an Executive Member of an SPO, my goal is to make sure that all the SPOs have the resources they need to continue to add value to their members and to the university. SPOs provide complimentary experiences that a university curriculum simply cannot match; for this reason, they are each an extraordinary entity and I want to see them all succeed.

Since the beginning of my “Temple Experience”, I have made a point to become actively involved in the organizations that support my local community. Some of these roles include: Treasurer for Temple Towers’ (Resident Hall) Executive Board, Resident Assistant (RA) of Elmira Jeffries (Resident Hall), Adviser for Elmira Jeffries’ Senate Executive Board, and Co-Founder & Minister of Scrimmages for Temple’s Ultimate Frisbee Team. In these roles I have worked with TSG, Student Affairs, Campus Recreation, and several other functional groups. This experience of having seen so many dimensions of Temple University has been important in helping me understand how to run an organization effectively. I want to do well and I think the experiences and knowledge that I have picked up from these roles will continue to be valuable.

Again, I appreciate the opportunity; I look forward to meeting with both of you.

Sincerely,

Manu Phatak

Association of Management Information Systems (AMIS) – Temple University

AMIS is a Student Professional Organization (SPO) devoted to those interested in Management Information Systems (MIS).  Our themes include:

• running Professional Development activities (develop soft skills),
• MIS related workshops (develop hard skills),
• and bringing employers, students, alumni, staff, and faculty together for a variety of events including recruiting events, guest speakers, and networking events.

This school year I am the acting Secretary for AMIS. I manage the record keeping activities and the general information dissemination for the organization. I team directly with the following teams within the organization:

• Webmasters — This team manages site design, site enhancements and upgrades, and site support. This year our webmasters have launched the AMIS site powered by WordPress, a very powerful Content Management System (CMS). The are constantly investigating or implementing plug ins to add features to the site; examples include the following:
  • Paypal/E-commerce – Empowers site users with the ability to pay membership dues, activity fees, and make donations online
  • Calendar – Automates the event calendar as seen on the homepage.
  • Custom Forms - Create custom forms/questionnaires on the go.
  • Custom Admin – Customize every detail of user privileges in the admin console.
• Marketing — This team is fundemental in the success of AMIS’ activities; they support the organizations’ event planners–Directors of Professional Development, Networking/Community, External Relations, etc–with the skill set to distribute information throughout the organization. Marketing has been known to produce high quality email fliers, print fliers, and display cases throughout the business campus.
• Membership — AKA the organization’s database manager. Membership keeps detailed records of our events, members, meetings, attendance, and whatever else you can think of. This is crucial creating reports that are required by the university to stay in play.

http://www.temple-amis.org

AMIS at the IT Awards

J.P. Morgan

Investment Bank Technology: Core Processing North American Equities Plan (IBT CP NA Equities Plan)

For Summer 2008 I worked out of the Newark, DE office for JP Morgan. I filled a support role for a plan team working on a variety of different projects. I participated in implementing the quarterly release of a fairly ubiquitous, vendor-managed processing system; I was also creating and distributing management newsletters, and designing a training platform for a highly-anticipated, globally-released application.

The take-aways were about understanding the value of project management and business process analysis. I left with a practical and applicable understanding of IT solutions and Financial Markets. The keys of success for the internship were to test what I have learned in the classroom in the real-world and to bring the practicality of the “real-world” back to the classroom.

Elmira Jeffries – Temple University

Chances are you were not a fan of your RA when you lived in university housing–it happens.

I was a RA for Temple University for the 2007-2008 academic year; my building, Elmira Jeffries, housed about 130 residents, 36 of which were (more or less) my responsibility. I created a variety of programs and events throughout the school year, I made myself available for ad-hoc “advising”, and, at some points, I confronted and resolved serious issues. I was the mentor for the building’s Executive Senate, which is a representative resident group; my duties to them was limited to managing the scope of their work and making campus resources available to them–they were fairly self-sufficient.

It is important to me to understand that the value of this experience is completely relevant to my career path. A large part of my experience was about analyzing and understanding the culture in my building and tailoring it to the point that it actually encourages academic, professional, personal, and social progress–understand you can’t force these things. This experience left my leadership and my confidence finely tuned with excellence.

My Neighbors

Computer & Information Science – Temple University

I was Lab Assistant for Temple’s CIS department for the 2007 to 2008 academic year. As a lab assistant I sat in on lab sessions for a CIS Intro course: Computers and Applications–a BBA core requirement. The focus of the lab sessions was to give the class a hands-on experience with Dreamweaver and Excel–and other office applications including Word, Powerpoint, and Access. My role in the classroom was to float around and help people keep up with the lecture. Outside of the classroom I offered everyone office hours, tutoring by appointment, email support, and I was responsible for grading all of the assignments.

This was a great experience; I learned more about the applications we taught then what I could have even potentially learned when I took the course. Through the year I became very effective at teaching the applications and material taught in the course–which turns out to be fairly universal skill. I took interest in pushing the scope of the class and investigating topics on my own.

Management Information Systems – Temple University

I am relatively good at relational databases–ie MS SQL, Oracle, mySQL, and Access.  I have been tutoring since the beginning of the semester; as a tutor, I make my self available to help people through the Database Management course.  Through helping others with database concept and syntax I have found my own understanding of the material to be developing immensely.