Job Market Materials

Last year, I applied for academic, tenure track, jobs at several communication departments, information schools, and in HCI-focused computer science programs with a tradition of hiring social scientists.

Being “on the market” — as it is called — is both scary and time consuming. Like me, many candidates have never been on the market before. Candidates are asked to produce documents in genres — e.g., cover letters, research statements, teaching statements, diversity statements — that most candidates have never written, read, or even heard of.

Candidates often rely on their supervisors for advice. I did so and my advisors were extremely helpful. The reality, however, is that although candidates’ advisors may sit on hiring committees, most have not been on candidates’ side of job market themselves for years or even decades.

The Internet is full of websites, like the academic jobs wiki, Academia StackExchange, and the Chronicle of Higher Education forums for people on the market. Confused and insecure candidates ask questions of the form, “Does blank matter?” and the answer is usually, “Doing/having blank may help/hurt, but it is only one factor of many.” The result is that candidates worry about everything. Then they worry about what they should be worrying about, but are not.

The most helpful thing, for me, was to read and synthesize the material submitted by recent successful job market candidates. For example, Michael Bernstein — a friend from MIT, now at Stanford — published his research and teaching statements on his website and I found both useful as I prepared mine. That said, I was surprised by how little material like this I could find on the web. For example, I could not find any examples of recent job market cover letters from successful candidates in fields close to mine.

So to help fill this gap, I am publishing all of my job market material. I’ve posted both the PDFs of the material I submitted as well as the LaTeX templates I used to generate the documents in my packet. My packet included:

• Research Statement (TeX) — A description of my research to date and my current trajectory. Following a convention I have seen others follow, I “cited” my own work (but only my work) to form a a curated bibliography of my own publications and working papers.
• Teaching Statement (TeX) — A two-page description of my approach to teaching, a list of my teaching experience, and a description of sample courses.
• Diversity Statement (TeX) — A description of how I think about diversity and how I have, and will, engage with it in my teaching and research.
• Cover Letter (TeX) — Each application I sent had a customized cover letter. I wrote mine on MIT letter head. Since each letter is different, I have published the letter I sent to the department that I took the job in (UW Communication). Because my new department did not request research and teaching statements, the cover letter includes material taken from both. For departments that requested separate statements, I limited myself to a shorter (1.5 pages) version of the letter with a similar structure.
• Writing Samples — I included three or four of my papers to every job I applied to. The selection of articles changed a bit depending on the department but I included at least one single-authored paper in each packet.
• Letters of Recommendation — Because I didn’t write these and haven’t seen them, I can’t share them. I requested letters from my four committee members: Eric von Hippel, Yochai Benkler, Mitch Resnick, and Tom Malone.
• Curriculum Vitae (TeX) — I have tried to keep my CV up-to-date during graduate school. I keep my CV in git and have a little CGI script automatically rebuild the published version whenever an update is committed.

I hope people going “on the market” will find these materials useful. Obviously, you should not copy or reuse the text of any of my material. It is your application, after all. That said, please do help yourself to the formatting and structure.

Finally, I would encourage anyone who builds on my material to republish their own material to help other candidates. If you do, I’d appreciate a link back or comment on this blog post so that my readers can find your improvements.