There are a lot of sources of advice for job application documents. I relied largely on Karen Kelsky’s site and book, both called The Professor Is In. Two things that are lacking in these resources are STEM-specific advice and examples of real, successful job documents. I am sharing mine here, along with some comments.

This year (2017-2018) was my third year on the tenure-track job market, and by far my most successful. I applied for 33 TT jobs, did 16 Skype or phone interviews, and did 5 campus visits. I received and accepted a job offer from Indiana State University. The jobs were a diverse range of teaching-focused departments, including liberal arts and teaching-focused public schools. I visited two Baptist-affiliated schools, one Catholic school, and two public universities.

Here is my Curriculum Vitae as of Spring 2018. I did not modify this between applications, except as updates were warranted.

My Cover Letter was written mostly following Karen Kelsky’s suggested template. The main change that I made from her suggestions was to put my teaching paragraph before my research paragraphs. This was my biggest change from my previous years of applications, and I had much more success in the 2017-2018 application season. I think this is a major difference between STEM fields (physics in particular) compared to the humanities and social sciences — the R1 career track is completely different from the teaching-focused track. Putting research first in your letter may signal to search committees that you want a position where you can put research first.

I kept my Teaching Statement to one page, unless the job ad requested something longer (one of the jobs I interviewed for asked for two pages, and I was able to expand this statement a bit by including paragraphs I had trimmed from previous years). I modified this a bit based on what kind of class sizes the schools offered, and if the school has a physics major or not.

My Research Statement didn’t change much between applications, except when schools had particularly quirky requests in the job ad, or for the few places I applied that offer a master’s degree in physics.

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