French applying for a 6 month internship in Australia

[Afanthomme]

Mentor note: removed the attachments, see post 3

Hi everyone,
I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this, if I am wrong I will delete this thread as soon as possible.

I am a french student, currently looking for a 6-months internship abroad, required by my school.
Being interested in Neural physics, i found a lab in Sydney that looks interesting, and wanted to know if you could help me correcting my résumé and "research interest" (as a student, it is not really developped...).

Thank you very much for your help,

Arnaud

 

[DEvens]

Experience listed most recent first, then second most recent, etc. You have the oldest at the top.

On your cover letter, the word "as" after "Dear Sir" should be capitalized. Like so.

Dear Sir,

As a student ...

I think you may be getting tripped up on English/French spelling. Maybe you have your spell checker set to French? Crystal not cristal. I think you meant to say programming not programmation.

I like that you have a cover letter that asks for a specific thing, with specific dates. It helps a busy person at the other end to know what it is they are supposed to decide.
I like that your Resume fits on one page. I like that you included contact info, languages spoken, nationality. These are important if the school is to have you work for them.

I have no real idea what the school you are applying to wants. So I don't know if these are the correct things to emphasize. Possibly you can Google the school you are interested in and see if there is anything on their web pages that you may have missed. Maybe you can even find some email contacts for potential profs to work for.

 

[Afanthomme]

Thank you very much, I made the changes you suggested !

In fact I am not applying to a school but directly to the research department. I have found a page with a "contact the research expert" form, but I also found the email of the responsible of the department, so I don't really know what contact I should use (mostly because I think the form is for people applying for long-term research positions)

 

[mfb]

Are you sure you want to share all your personal data? Google finds it, and your potential future employer can find it as well together with everyone else.
I removed the attachments for now - if you really want to share them like this just tell me and I can add them again. Or (which is a way better option) remove your name and address and so on, just keep the things interesting for the thread here. I can put new versions into the first post if you like.

Concerning the content:
In the research interest, I would not mention that you need such an internship. It reads like "oh well, I have to do something, can I please spend 6 months at your lab to get it done?"
I don't know the French system, will you do some lab/theory work (more than 1-2 weeks) and write a thesis for the BSc before February 2016? That should go into the CV even if it is not done yet.

If "computing" is one of the two interests listed (I don't think this list helps), you should have more than basic knowledge in two programming languages ("basic knowledge of syntax" sounds like you wrote a hello world program). "graphical user interfaces and instrument interfaces" means programming them? I would add that word.

Fluent knowledge of English and spelling errors just don't fit. Also, where does the fluent knowledge come from without some stay abroad? The French accent can be tricky.

 

[Afanthomme]

Thank you for removing the files, i don't think there's much of interest to learn here but still i'll do a new version without informations !

I won't have any experimental/theoretical experience by then, this internship is supposed to be our first real contact with the research domain.

About the programming, I mostly write some Python scripts to simulate some physical situation described in homeworks (especially simple statistical physics models) and during the month long internship I wrote a script with a GUI to control some arbitrary waveform generator. The other languages I only know basics, but never really used them since I already know Python.
And yes I think i can skip this list, just mention I already used Python.

The spelling mistakes are to be corrected of course. In Classe Preparatoires we had weekly individual oral examinations in english, so it helped me work on my accent. But I can remove the "fluent" mention if you think I should.

 

[mfb]

I know French speakers who spoke English every day for years, and are still hard to understand even for native speakers. Sure, those are outliers, but they exist.
Weekly oral exams, probably mainly by other Frenchs, don't give fluency in English. You can mention those exams in the CV, however.

 

[Afanthomme]

Ok, for me "fluent" just meant that I could hold a conversation without stopping to find my words.
So, my bad, I remove that.

Do you think that replacing "required" by "encouraged" or "given the opportunity" would be better? Because I think it is important to keep the fact that the internship is part of my studies.