Whether you’re applying for extra-academic jobs, postdoctoral fellowships, or tenure-track positions, the cover letter is an important part of the job application. Your resume or CV provides a snapshot of what you’ve been up to in your career, but it leaves out all of the context and nuance needed to understand your career trajectory. Even …
Along my academic journey, I’ve done things that I was trained to think of as “wrong” that worked out just fine. Professionalization is an important part of the PhD training process, but I’ve learned two things from my experiences as a graduate student and beyond based on not following the path I was trained to: …
Research, teaching, and service are often framed as the three pillars of a tenure-track faculty job. This framing arguably simplifies the job and overlooks a core role that faculty play as mentors and, relatedly, career coaches. For both undergraduate and graduate students, faculty serve as role models and sources of information about what it means …
How do faculty look at job applications? I recently asked this on Academic Twitter and got 311 responses and some additional replies. The vast majority of faculty first look at the CV (66 percent), but a good 31 percent start with the cover letter. In today’s post, I’m going to talk about the CV and …
These days, graduate students learn early that to get and keep an academic job they need to publish, publish, publish. In fact, many programs have turned requirements like a Master’s thesis into a paper so that students have something early on to place before they hit the job market. What’s not as often communicated is …
To wrap up the series on jobs, this post is about non-academic research career options. Full disclosure: Evaluation research was my career for 8 years before starting a PhD program. Based on my positive experiences, I am a big advocate for non-academic research jobs. There are a wide range of options in this category of …
As you prepare to go on the academic job market, think about where you’d ideally like to work. More specifically, the kind of institution you want to work at and for. This means thinking about how your priorities align with the different kinds of schools. Tenure-track jobs at all institutions of higher education include some …
Throughout my time as a PhD student, I heard about “postdoctoral fellowships” as an option after graduating. No one ever directly explained what they meant when they mentioned that so-and-so got a “postdoc” or there’s a new “postdoc” program, but there seemed to be an underlying assumption that postdocs provided an opportunity to focus solely …
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