Here lie the documents I wrote for my academic job applications during Fall 2023. Are these good examples? We'll know by April 2024 if I got a job — but everyone's tired advice to #network is hilariously true in academia. You'll get a job mostly based on who you know, who knows you, how they know you, and what you've done (your CV) in that order. If you're applying somewhere where you know someone (or your advisor knows someone), make sure they know (somehow) that you're applying.
But writing a nice set of statements might help, so here are 4 documents that every application asked for:
- Cover Letter: This and the CV are probably what everyone on the search committee will read when making the preliminary list of people to interview virtually. Ensure that your cover letter has your strongest points in your favor with regards to suitability, research, teaching, etc.
- Research Statement: Writing in terms of themes of my research until now, and themes moving forward helped me draft this statement.
- Teaching Statement: Useful if applying to liberal arts schools in the US. Most research schools might not even read this, so if you're only applying to those don't sweat it. Unless you actually care about and enjoy teaching, which I do, but beware that most research schools don't😒.
- Diversity Statement: I find it helps to be concrete in terms of real-life examples of how you have helped diversify your teaching/research, and how you will moving forward.
Some quick notes:
- I applied (mostly) to Linguistic and Computer Science departments in the USA.
- Feel free to steal any ideas in content or style from these statements. I hope they help you.
- Tailoring the statements to each department is probably a waste of time. Just make sure you change the names of departments/schools in different applications — you don't want to seem sloppy. Or draft the statements to be agnostic like I've done here.
- Use Interfolio Dossier to send recommendation letters — personalized recommendation letters are probably a waste of time too. Moreover, your advisors and professors are terminally busy and they'll appreciate not receiving constant reminders to submit the same PDF for every job application.
- All the LaTeX templates used in these statements are up on my
texmfrepository — steal what you like, or use them wholesale. - My CV is also available on GitHub, as is my résumé.