Applying for academic jobs

by Megumi Harada, Spring 2003

(CAVEAT: These notes describe my personal experience with the postdoctoral job search back in 2003 and is a copy of an essay I wrote then for the UC Berkeley MGSA. Other students may have different experiences and opinions.)

Before you begin: Before you get into this, you should be asking yourself: is an academic job really what I want? There are practical reasons to ask the question: look at some recent statistics for academic employment and salaries (check out the AMS website), and check out the UBC Career Center. I've found that the CMS website has useful links for employment in non-academic jobs, as well as articles on the mathematical career: check it out here.

Here are some books you might want to at least browse before you imagine that you're convinced that you really do want to teach calculus or linear algebra every year for another 30-odd years. These books are meant to help people like you envision what you're getting yourself into (the monolith of academic bureaucracy, the tenure game, et cetera).

• Academic's Handbook, edited by A. Leigh DeNeef and Craufurd D. Goodwin. 2nd ed.
  
• Tomorrow's Professor, Richard M. Reis
  

Getting started: All right, so you've decided. You're graduating this academic year, and it's the fall semester. There are a few things to do:

• Get an account at MathJobs and update yourself regularly on the job listings.
• Check out the AMS Job Ads regularly at www.ams.org.
  
• Sign up for the AMS employment listings emails. You'll receive near-daily updates.
  
• Andrew Green, the Ph.D. counselor at the UC Berkeley Career Center, hosts weekly evening seminars on the academic job hunt. He's friendly and reasonably knowledgeable, although I've heard people say that his experience tends towards the humanities.
  
• Arrange to go to the big January joing meeting of the AMS and MAA, etc. This is where a lot of the employment/hiring gets done. Certainly it's not necessary to go in order to get a job, but it can't hurt, and you'll meet lots of people.
  

The Nitty-Gritty: Okay, so you've been perusing the AMS website, you have a mental list of places you'd like to go. So what's in an application? It depends on the institution, but here are the basic ingredients of a typical application:

• Cover letter. Use the style file ucbletter.sty to get something that looks official. Here's what goes in a typical cover letter, not necessarily in any order. Introduce yourself. State your name, supervisor, Ph.D. topic, and who in the department to which you're applying is supporting your application. You might give here a brief description of your research. Address your teaching: list your teaching awards, your high evaluation scores. If you've taught during the summer, say so. Address your non-academic service activities, indicating you take an active role in the math community: list your roles, e.g. as an organizer of the mentor program for first-years, your service as an MGSA officer, organizer of the graduate student colloquium, etc. Don't forget to itemize and/or list the reference letters you'll be sending, e.g. "I have arranged for letters of reference to be sent to you separately by Profs. X and Y and Z..." In closing, make sure they know how to contact you: give them your email address and phone number, and if you're attending the big January joint meetings and giving a talk, say so, and tell them exactly which session you'll be attending and the time and location of your talk.
  
• AMS coversheet. This is straightforward; download it from the AMS website and fill it in.
  
• CV. Again, not in any order, a CV should contain the following information: Your name and address. Citizenship. Educational background (here you should give your complete PhD dissertation title, along with your supervisor's name). List of awards: OMIT undergraduate stuff. Teaching experience: DON'T make it exhaustive, especially if you've taught the same course many times. On the other hand, make sure to include all the different courses you have taught. Distinguish between being a TA and an Instructor if you've taught during the summer (and hence were the sole instructor for a course). List of publications: these should be those at the level of "published in...", "to appear in...", or "submitted to...." Current research: these are papers in progress. List of talks: all the talks you've given at conferences and at faculty-sponsored Berkeley seminars. Giving a poster at an AMS session counts. The information you give regarding a talk: the month/year of your talk, the seminar/conference title, and the title of your talk. List of collaborators: give their names and institutions. Memberships: e.g. AMS, AWM, MAA, etc. List of other academic functions: e.g. MGSA officer 2002-2003, President of Noetherian Ring, Organizer of Grad Student Colloquium, etc.
  
• Research statement. Some words of wisdom: remember, you're now writing for a wide audience, not just your advisor or your buddies in your field. Learn to explain your results, and your plans for your future research, without too much technical language. An important preliminary step is to have your grad student buddies who aren't in your field read your research statement and give you feedback on whether they feel they understand the big picture of your results. It's also important to get feedback from people who are more experienced with reading such statements, so get your advisor and your post-doc friends to read it also.
  
• Publication list This should be an itemized list of your publications, with title and abstracts. You can include papers in progress if you have some partial results.
  
• Teaching Statement Keep it short and to the point. Focus on one or two aspects of how you interact with students in a classroom which you believe distinguises you from other teachers.
  
• Any preprints If you have them, send them along -- it can't hurt.

The Logistics: To help you with producing cover letters en masse:

• robocover.tex
• addresses.tex

These are generic sample files (the originals were generously contributed by Emma Carberry) which will help you generate lots of cover letters at once. The file robocover.tex reads in the file addresses.tex to generate custom-made letters to each of your institutions. If you look at the files, it should be straightforward to figure out how they work!