October 17, 2026
Dear [Hiring manager's name],
I spent last summer as a software engineering intern at Fernhollow Labs, where I shipped a feature to production before my internship ended, which not every intern on my team could say. I'm applying for your Computer Science Intern role because your posting promises real production work instead of a side project nobody on the team will ever look at again.
During that internship I built a caching layer for an internal search tool that cut average query time from 900 milliseconds to 140 for the 30-person team that used it daily, and I wrote the test suite that caught two edge-case bugs before code review ever saw them. In coursework, my team's compiler project for a systems class placed first out of 42 teams on a benchmark the professor didn't announce until judging day.
I'm comfortable in Python, Java and C, have built three personal projects deployed on real infrastructure rather than left running only on my laptop, and I pick up an unfamiliar codebase quickly because I've had to do it cold every internship and class project so far. I ask specific questions instead of guessing, which every mentor I've had has mentioned unprompted.
I'd welcome the chance to talk through the caching project or the compiler benchmark in more detail, or to work through a coding exercise if that's part of how [Company name] evaluates intern candidates. Thank you for considering my application.
Sincerely,
Arjun Robinson