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Category Archives: How To Write Academic Job Cover Letters
Why Your Job Cover Letter Sucks (and what you can do to fix it)
For the next few months I will be posting the “best of the best” Professor is in blog posts on the job market, for the benefit of all those girding their loins for the 2013-2014 market. Today’s post was originally … Continue reading
Posted in Bad Advisors and Good Mentors, How To Write Academic Job Cover Letters, Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Major Job Market Mistakes, Stop.Acting.Like.A.Grad.Student, Strategizing Your Success in Academia
Tagged academic job cover letter, academic job market help, academic job search help, applying for academic jobs, applying for professor job, applying for university job, getting a tenure track job, getting faculty job, higher education job, how to fix your cover letter, how to get a professor job, how to get a tenure track job, how to write a job cover letter, tenure track job cover letter, the academic job search, what do search committees look for, why can't I get a tenure track job
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The Six Ways You’re Acting Like a Grad Student (And how that’s killing you on the job market)
For the next few months I will be posting the “best of the best” Professor is in blog posts on the job market, for the benefit of all those girding their loins for the 2013-2014 market. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Today we have … Continue reading
Posted in How To Do Conferences, How to Interview, How To Write Academic Job Cover Letters, Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Major Job Market Mistakes, Stop.Acting.Like.A.Grad.Student, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Tenure--How To Get It, Yes, You Can: Women in Academia
Tagged academic job market help, assertiveness training exercise, body language of women, getting a tenure track job, How to deal with professors, How to shake hands, women professional success, women succeeding in graduate school
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How To Identify Yourself as a Diversity Hire
One of the most important things a job document can do is communicate an applicant’s status with regard to diversity hiring. If you qualify as a diversity hire, you must make sure the committee knows it. But how does one … Continue reading
Nobody Cares What You’re Interested In
One very common error that writers of job documents make is going on and on about what they are interested in. It’s often quite a writing tic. “I am interested in…. and I am particularly interested in…and a topic of … Continue reading
Gerund Addiction and Word Repetition–Two More Scourges
Faithful readers know that I have several posts on different kinds of writing tics that plague many academic writers. These include list addiction, dyad addiction, and cheap adjectives. There are two more writing tics that I’ve come to identify: gerund … Continue reading
List Addiction, Cont’d: The Dyad
List addiction is an epidemic among academic writers. I have a blog post about the subject (which I knew nothing about prior to my work in TPII), and I refer at least 50% of clients to that blog post at … Continue reading
Banish These Words
Do not use the words “unique” or “burgeoning” in any of your job documents. They are painfully overused. The first is just trite. The second is over-dramatic. That is all.
Posted in Graduate Student Concerns, How to Get Grants and Fellowships, How To Write Academic Job Cover Letters, How To Write CVs, Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Major Job Market Mistakes, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Teaching and Research Statements, Teaching Portfolios, Writing Instrumentally
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Damning Yourself With Faint Praise–Teaching Edition
For some reason people love to include undergraduate student feedback in the teaching paragraph of their job letters, and that feedback usually looks like this (from an actual letter): “Former students have consistently told me that I give helpful feedback … Continue reading
The Worst Job Letter Ever Written (Not really…)
A few months ago one of my clients, after completing work with me on her job letter, ruefully sent along the original version of the letter that she had been using the previous year. She wrote, “I’ve attached a copy … Continue reading
Tailoring a Job Letter, Beginning and Advanced
Today I return to the subject of tailoring a job letter. Whenever I find myself making the same corrections again and again across different client documents, I know that I’ve found a pattern (or “pataan”–as they say in Japanese–and “pataan” … Continue reading
