job_and_career.md

Job Search and Career Related

• Under Construction: The current version is maintained by Song Huang. The material here is still highly incomplete and is likely to show personal bias. Any help or suggestion on improving this document, especially the general advice part, will be highly appreciated.

Can I haz a job? General Career Advice

• Getting an acedemic job is never easy, but at least you can prepare these things:

• Choose Your Own Adventure: Developing A Values-Oriented Framework for Your Career by Lucianne Walkowicz

  • I think you should read this, every word of it, before you read anything else. This is probably the best career advice I have ever read. I worked on my mission statement right after I read this.

• FindingAda website has a nice poster: What kind of technologist could I be?

  • "The poster aims to explode the idea that the only people who work in tech are programmers, and that traditionally female-coded roles, such as Teacher, Communicator and Facilitator are ‘not really tech jobs’."
  • "The role descriptions are left intentionally general so that students can more easily explore the nuances of different jobs within each catgory."
  • Many of these roles also apply to researchers or person with an academic background.

• Brown University's CareerLAB has a few nice guidance for finding job inside and outside academia:

  • Finding a job in academia
  • The Application Packet for an Academic Position Part I and Part II
  • Outside Academia – Finding a Job in Industry, Business, or Nonprofits

• Astrobites also have some nice career inside and outside astronomy (use Career Navigation as keyword):

  • Alternative Careers: Leveraging your Astronomy Degree for Data Science
  • Astronomers Beyond Astronomy: Using Your Degree Outside of Academia

• AstroBetter has a pretty nice series of career profiles (not complete):

  • Astronomer to Defense Researcher
  • Astronomer to Data Visualization Specialist and Adjunct Associate Professor
  • Astronomer to Chief of the Nautical Almanac Office at the US Naval Observatory
  • Astronomer to Associate Director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute
  • Astronomer to University Administrator in a Center for Teaching & Learning
  • Astronomer to Senior Editor for Nature
  • Astronomer to President of a Defense Industry Company
  • Astronomer to Image Processor for STScI
  • Astronomer to Financial Analyst
  • Astronomer to Full Professor of Physics at a Small Liberal Arts College
  • Astronomer to Head of Bioinformatics
  • Astronomer to Data Scientist
  • Astronomer to Tenure Track Faculty at a California Community College
  • Astronomer to Tenure Track Faculty at a Teaching-Focused Institution
  • Astronomer to Faculty and Entrepreneur
  • Astronomer to Senior Staff Scientist in Industry
  • Astronomer to Data Scientist at Fidelity Investments
  • Astronomer to Director for the Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics

Stay in Academia

• Pathways to Success - A Holistic Approach to Professional Development from Cornell University
  • The name sounds like a cliché, but some of the advice here is pretty good.
• Advice from a Faculty Hiring Committee Chair
• Advice for Aspiring Astrophysicists by Katie Mack
• Post-doc / fellowship applications tips
• ASA Early Career Researcher Mentoring Workshop – Getting a Job Note by Bryan Gaensler & Sarah Maddison
  • These are some very good tips.

Searching for Astronomy Related Jobs

• AAS Job Register

  • Probably the most important website if you want to find a post-doc or faculty job.

• Astrophysics Jobs Rumor Mil

  • For faculty and staff
  • For postdoc and term job
  • Make sure that you don't spend too much time here during the job season.

Resources and Tools for Job Application

To Apply for an Academic Position

CV (Resume) and Publication List

• Guide to use resumes and CVs from Cornell University
• You can make a CV using whatever software you want (e.g. Word, Pages), but LaTeX makes very nice and professional looking CV.
• There are a good selection of LaTeX CV templates on Overleaf. Some of these are a little too fancy for acedemic, but they all look pretty good.

Personal Website

• It is actually pretty important to have a visible personal website that links your CV and contact information. Make sure that it can be found by search engine.

• This is especially important if you try to find job in another country (e.g. get a PhD in China, want a post-doc job in Europe) or when you know the hiring committee is not familiar with you.

• GitHub Pages is pretty good choice to make a nice-looking personal website. And there are some easy-to-use templates available, and there are more fancy ones available

  • How to Create a Simple Academic Website

• Good examples (personal choice: clean and informative)

  • Adrian Price-Whelan; the code can be found here
  • Dan Foreman-Mackey; the code can be found here

Recommendation Letters

• Help wanted

Research Plan and/or Research Proposal

• Guide to use research statement from Cornell University
• Hints on Preparing Research Proposals

Teaching Statement

Diversity Statement

• Developing and Writing a Diversity Statement from Vanderbilt University
• Demystifying the Diversity Statement from InsideHigjer ED

To Apply a Non-Academic Position

-- Help Wanted