How to spin work experience as a waitress for a job at J.P. Morgan

Want to work for J.P. Morgan when you graduate, but only have previous work experience as a waitress? It's OK. One London student who's achieved an internship on J.P. Morgan's structuring desk this summer has explained how she spun her time delivering food and drink to demanding customers when she wrote her J.P. Morgan cover letter.

"My cover letter was on the skills I learned as a waitress," she says in relation to an article on J.P. Morgan's resume preferences. "Always be friendly to the client, listen carefully, remember all information and get every order right, handle money quickly and correctly, coordinate with your co-workers, develop a thick skin, work long hours and do the hard work behind the scenes."

She argues that none of this is especially different to working on a trading floor. This may be so - J.P. Morgan certainly offered her a summer place. It probably helps too that as a waitress she was serving highly demanding VIPs and working on little sleep after waitressing through the night...

This approach is clearly better than that displayed in the infamous J.P. Morgan cover letter written by 'Mark', a mysterious student at NYU Stern, who applied to the bank in 2012. In it, he claimed to be able to, "bench double [his] body weight and do 35 pull ups," whilst achieving a GPA of 3.93. It's not clear whether he got a job as a result.