Advice for jobs in academia for soon-to-graduate Ph.D. student

December 4, 2006 8:58 AM

I am a fourth year Computer Science Ph.D. student, ABD, and am hopefully going to graduate summer next year. I have started up on the job process in the academia for a professorship (a bit late I guess - it’s December already). I am still in the semi-early phase of application: got done with the CV embellishments and the research & teaching statements, asked everyone to be ready with my reference letters, and am on the verge of selecting and sending out applications to about 50 universities of the 100 in the list I put together from postings on Chronicle and ACM Jobs. At this point I am interested in any advice I can get on this whole apping process, specially this part before the interview. If it matters, I am specializing in multi-agent systems (though I have done work in almost every major field in CS) and hopefully move to east coast.
posted by raheel to education (3 comments total)

Wow, in computer science you can get a tenure-track position without doing a postdoc first?
posted by grouse at 9:10 AM on December 4, 2006

Well, assistant professors are mostly hired for a tenure-track position in CS (I think).
posted by raheel at 9:16 AM on December 4, 2006

Typically "assistant professor" and "tenure-track" mean the same thing. An assistant professorship is a tenure-track position.

You are getting started pretty late. I'd recommend winnowing down your list of 50 to about 20 and making sure that you write very specific cover letters addressing how you personally fill the needs of each particular department. Do the same with your teaching statement: edit for each application so that it specifically addresses the curricula (undergraduate and graduate) of the department. The research statement doesn't need to be as specifically tailored, but make sure that the work you're proposing can at least be made to correspond to the advertised position.

Do you have a preference as to what kind of institution you want to be at? Research I? Undergraduate liberal arts? The type of institution will determine a lot about how you present yourself, particularly in terms of the balance between teaching and research.

After you get these 20 prioritized applications out, you can decide if you have the time and energy to work on the other 30 in your list of 50.

Have you talked to your advisor about this? Do you have friends at any of the institutions you're interested in? You definitely want to take advantage of any personal contacts.

Have you seen this book? I've found it to be helpful.
posted by mr_roboto at 1:00 PM on December 4, 2006