October 17, 2026
Dear [Hiring manager's name],
A dataset of three years of campus dining transactions sat untouched in a public repository until my capstone group and I used it to predict which meal-plan tiers would run over budget by finals week, and that project is why I'm applying for your Data Analytics internship. I'm a statistics major looking for a summer where the data is real and the stakes are, too.
For that project I cleaned and modeled roughly 40,000 transaction records in Python and built a regression model that flagged budget overruns two weeks earlier than the dining office's own tracking did. I also placed in the top 10% of a Kaggle housing-price competition I entered on my own, and I've worked as a teaching assistant for introductory statistics for three semesters, holding office hours for 20-plus students a week.
I work comfortably in Python, SQL, and Excel, and I've picked up enough Tableau this year to turn the dining project into a dashboard the department actually asked to keep using. Grading problem sets as a TA also means I can explain a confusing result clearly, which I've found matters as much as building the model in the first place.
I'd welcome the chance to talk with [Company name] about the kind of problems your analytics team is working on this summer and how the dining project or the Kaggle work might be useful there. I'm available for a summer internship and can start as soon as classes end.
Sincerely,
Peyton Walker