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Category Archives: Landing Your Tenure Track Job
Preparing for Your Interviews
Conferences have started and interviews have begun. TPII clients are scarfing up interview invites right and left, and it’s very gratifying. Normally, I would expect to do an Interview Bootcamp with most of my clients, to prepare them for the … 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
How to Write a Recommendation Letter
Today’s post is a special request post for all the people who have written in the past few months asking for a post on writing recommendation letters. A few of these folks have been letter-writers, but most of them are … Continue reading
Posted in Bad Advisors and Good Mentors, Graduate Student Concerns, How To Choose and Manage Recommenders, Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Major Job Market Mistakes, Promote Yourself!, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Writing Instrumentally
Tagged How to write a recommendation letter
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Dr. Karen’s Rules of the Research Statement
Today, at long last, and in response to popular demand, a post on the Research Statement. I have, perhaps, procrastinated on blogging about the Research Statement because at some level I felt that the rules might be more variable on … Continue reading
The Perils of “Nice,” Cont’d: Recommendation Edition
I got to see a letter of rec this week, and was stunned at the way it sabotaged my client, a SUPERB AND TOTALLY HARD-ASS candidate. It did this apparently from the best of intentions, by burying her achievements … 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
You’re Elite, The Job is Not: How Do You Tell Them You’ll Really Stay?
Today’s post is a Special Request Post for a reader, an ABD from an Ivy League, who wrote to ask, rather plaintively, how she might reassure a search committee for a job at a small, regional, teaching college that she … Continue reading
