Blue Lab Coats

A standard application package for an academic position has 4 important parts (generally speaking):

1. Cover Letter.

2. Your impressive CV.

3. A statement of your Research Interests.

4. A statement of your Teaching Philosophy & Interests.

Let’s take these one by one.

1. Cover Letter- This letter is your introduction to the search committee and is very important. When I am looking at an application I always read the cover letter carefully, and when you write one you should write it with that in mind. Here is a sample:  ( sample-cover-letter.pdf ). I think these should be brief…make your best effort to keep it to 1 page- if you can’t well… its probably ok to be a little over that, but don’t go overboard. Remember that all of your accomplishments will be nicely organized in your CV and research interests statements, and trying to fully explain all of that is not the purpose of the cover letter. I personally DON’T think that the special circumstance of the two-body problem … if you have a spouse that’s an academic scientist that also will need a job… should be mentioned in the cover letter. Let the search committee love you and want to interview you first, and we will let them know about your spectacular spouse-who-needs-academic-position once they are in love with you, and we actually have our foot in the door.

2. CV-

The CV should be ORGANIZED and EASY to read. I generated a sample (jane-v-smart-cv.pdf) but other samples can be found here and here. The CV for an academic science position generally include the following sections (there may be additional sections depending on your background, for example Patents, Service):

Name- Yours obviously.

Contact Information- Current address, phone, fax, and email where you prefer to be contacted. (it is not necessary to write whether or not you are married or have children in this section- I have seen this, and think it’s not a good idea)

Academic Training- list of dates attended, degrees awarded, institution and institutional addresses-one entry for each degree. Dates aligned on the Left- with the rest of the information indented and easy to access.

Positions Held- dates position was held, your title, One line description of your area of work, Name and degree of your supervisor, institution and institution city and state.

Fellowships and Awards-Dates awarded, Name of fellowship and awarding entity… or name of award.

Funding- VERY VERY IMPORTANT, to list all current and pending funding. Active and Expiration Dates of Funding (or date applied if submitted but PENDING), Agency and proposal #, your role on the grant (PI, co-PI etc), $$ perhaps, and whether or not the proposal is pending.

Invited Presentations- Date presentation was given, Institution, Institution city and state.

Professional Licenses and Society Memberships- Dates of membership and/or licensure, Name of professional society or licensing body and license #.

Teaching- Break this in two - into lecture and classroom teaching - includes dates taught, course name number, and the second section is mentoring- or one-on-one teaching of postdocs, graduate students, and/or undergraduates that you have supervised- the dates that you mentored each, the name of each student, and their educational program at the time you interacted with them (i.e. Ph.D. candidate, Undergraduate Genetics Major etc.)

Publications- This is obvious. Organize as you wish.

References (names of 3-5 individuals whom you have already asked, and KNOW to be able to provide you a good letter of recommendation - you don’t want any surprises here). Make sure you include full contact information for each of your references including current email addresses, so that they may be contacted directly by the search committee.

Some candidates also include a list of meetings attended/poster presentations and abstracts submitted- I personally don’t include this information and don’t generally look at it when looking at a bunch of CVs.

Additional advice about CV writing can be found here and here… courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Personally, I dislike too much information on the CV however. For example- while its a good idea to list your thesis title, advisor’s name, and institution under research experience- I don’t favor putting in a description of your project or the names of the members of your thesis committee.

3. Research interests should be concise and summarize what project you will focus on and where you will take this project in the first 5 years of your new job. Personally, I like sort of an NIHesque format- research interests written with a brief summary up front, and then broken down in terms of specific aims, with experimental approaches under each aim, then briefly and generally how this will get you toward your long term goals. If you have already written a grant for independent funding- then the hard work of planning for the first 5 years of your faculty position has already been done. DO NOT try to cover everything that you have done and everything that you may, at some point in the near and distant future even think about doing in the statement of research interests. Your goal here is to be focused and convey to the search committee that you have defined a problem you are interested in, it’s an important problem, and you have developed a reasonable approach to this problem that is likely to give a big payoff.

4. Teaching statement. Some institutions have a heavy emphasis on teaching- and they want to know 1. That you believe that teaching is important (and presumably you do since you are applying for a job in ACADEMIC science) , 2. what you see yourself as capable of teaching, and 3. what your ‘teaching philosophy’ is. I don’t have any very good advice- other than to summarize this in no more than 1 page. (I’ll provide a sample at some point).