William Holcomb
3201 Westerwald Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21218
Carla Flaim
Health Care for the Homeless
111 Park Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21201

Dear Ms. Flaim,

I was excited to see your job opening announcement for a network support technician position. I believe my skills would be a valuable addition to your organization.

From my first position as a helpdesk technician for Bristol Regional Medical Center in 1998, I have over ten years experience in workstation and network support for six organizations. One of the most challenging of these positions was as a Cisco Certified Academy Instructor with the Peace Corps in West Africa. In addition to teaching networking at the University of Nouakchout in Mauritania, I also maintained and provisioned over 40 workstations at a dozen Girls' Mentoring Centers located throughout the Sahara Desert, including a lab with a Windows 2000 domain controller and file server.

Returning from Peace Corps, I had sole responsibility for the Marijuana Policy Project's group of websites that contained over 10,000 pages amassed over ten years, thus solidifying my skills in working independently and meeting deadlines. In particular, maintaining the "victims" portion of the site highlighted the relationship between entrenched poverty and social justice in the United States that I hadn't seen in Mauritania.

I left MPP to to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University primarily because I enjoy teaching. After a year and a half of classwork, however, I missed the sense of contributing to the world that I got from both Peace Corps and MPP. I took a leave of absence to attempt to start a non-profit focused on using computer systems to help people find work.

After six months, I've learned the hard way that "fixing the world" is a rather tough problem, to say the least. Rather than tackling the problem alone, I am looking for an opportunity to both learn more about the problem of poverty from an effective non-profit like Health Care for the Homeless, while lending my technical expertise to help you grow.

I am very excited about the opportunity to apply my skills in computer science to improving the lives of people in my community; I would love the opportunity to meet with you to discuss the position. If you you need any additional information, feel free to contact me at wholcomb@gmail.com.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.