What Materials Do You Need?

Now that you know what jobs exist, as well as when and where to apply, it’s time to prepare your application materials!

Your applications will almost certainly require the following materials:

1. References or Letters of Recommendation (three to five)
2. A Cover Letter
3. A CV or Resume
4. A Research Statement

Many positions will also ask for:

1. A Teaching Statement (required for academic applications)
2. A Diversity Statement
3. Three Indicative Publications

Some international universities have extremely structured templates, such as this “CV template for the employment and promotion of teachers” from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

On the rest of this tab, we’ll provide an overview and tips to help you get started on each part of your application.

We also include select examples of successful materials from each category. More examples are available on the Example Materials tab.

Letters of Recommendation

Letters of recommendation are a critical part of your application, providing an external validation of your qualifications and potential. You will typically need three to five letters from individuals who know your work well. Common letter writers include:

• Your Primary Advisor: This will be your longest and most important letter.
• Co-Advisor or Committee Members: The longer your professional relationship, the better. Prioritize committee members with whom you have co-authored a paper.
• Internship Supervisor: Especially useful for Industrial Research positions, and also a good choice for academic positions if you co-authored a paper together.
• Other Professors You’ve Worked With: Prioritize those with whom you’ve published a paper, especially if they can provide unique insights not covered by other letter writers.
• A Faculty Co-Instructor: If you are applying to teaching-focused positions, you may have acted as an instructor of record. It can be valuable to have a letter writer who can speak directly to your teaching and classroom management abilities.

While one of your letters will come from your advisor, you may have only published papers with your advisor and the supervisor from you summer internship. So where do you find the other two?

Start now! Email other professors in your department and make appointments to discuss your research and plans. Ask if they have any ideas, talk about possible collaborations, and seek their feedback on drafts of your papers. The better they know you, the stronger their letters can be, and you might even have some valuable research ideas in the process.

If you plan to do your job search interviews in the Spring of Year X, talk to your advisor about who should write your letters in the Summer of Year X-1 (or earlier!), and then ask them by the end of that summer. When discussing potential letter writers with your advisor, seek their input on who might provide the most compelling endorsements based on your career goals. Give your letter writers plenty of advance notice.

Martin Monperrus notes that letters of recommendation are “very big in the US, not so big in Europe. Because of this cultural difference, European applicants may not realize how much effort they must put in for their US application letters.”

Organizing Things for your Letter Writers

Make a Spreadsheet for your Letter Writers: To ensure that your letters of recommendation are submitted on time and to the correct places, it’s essential to keep your letter writers organized and informed. We recommend that you create and share a spreadsheet with your letter writers that contains:

• The schools you are applying to
• The application deadline
• A link to the submission portal
• Any special instructions or notes

You can see Wes’s letter-writer chart here. It’s not perfect and I’m sure you could improve on the format but no one complained. It should also give you an idea of how the due dates vary between top-tier teaching-ish schools (e.g., Oberlin at November 19) and standard research schools (e.g. CMU at January 15).

Letter Submission Process: Most schools use some kind of special online web-system for applications. If you’re like Claire or Madeline, you will be annoyed by the fact that the systems are all basically the same, yet each one requires you to create a new account. A few use academicjobsonline.com or Interfolio. These are by far the easiest positions to apply for.

Regardless of the system used, schools typically accept letters of recommendation via email or through their online system. However, they may ask your letter writers to use a specific form or platform. For positions hosted on academicjobsonline.com or Interfolio, your letter writers can often submit one letter to multiple schools. If you go this route, make sure to:

1. Communicate Clearly with Your Letter Writers: Ensure they know not to mention a specific school name in the letter unless it’s tailored for that school.
2. Strategically Use This Option: You may want to only use this approach with your secondary letter writers. Your advisor may want to customize their letter each schools.

A couple of schools ask for letters only after a first cut of applications, in which case they will contact your letter-writers directly.

Loosely, your letter-writers will write the letters a day or two before the first one is due and then send them all out.

Lost Letters: As an aside, it is very common for letters of recommendation to fail to make it all the way to the people who need to see them. This can be due to various issues, such as:

• The letter writer did not submit a letter despite a request from the school.
• A miss-typed email address in your application.
• The school never issued a request for the letter.
• The letter was submitted but got lost in the process.
• The letter was successfully submitted, but the system failed to register it.

Wes had at least six places email to say only one or two of his letters gad arrived, asking to have the others emailed directly to some address. It is quite reasonable to send follow-up email to confirm that all of your letters have been received (this also shows interest in the position, but it’s unlikely anyone will notice at this stage).

Cover Letters

Getting a cover letter wrong can have significant consequences. A poorly crafted cover letter can lead to your entire application being misfiled or overlooked.

Claire Le Goues, who was Chair of the S3D Tenure Track Hiring Committee at CMU from 2019 to 2022, has learned that cover letters are much more important now than they were in prior decades. She suggests that applicants not treat cover letters as an afterthought.

Your cover letter should be brief and to the point. It should:

1. Quickly introduce who you are (e.g., name, current institution and title).
2. Specify the job you are applying for (including any reference numbers).
3. Give a high-level overview of your research focus.
4. Indicate why you are excited about the position, why you are a good fit, and why you are likely to accept an offer.
5. Mention any special circumstances (e.g., two-body problem).

Limit the overview of your research focus to a paragraph or two; your research statement is the place for detail. This is particularly important when applying to large schools that may have many independent searches but only one application portal. If you find it difficult to summarize, Wes recommends prioritizing outcomes (e.g., awards) over lower-level mechanisms (e.g., mentioning that you use a particular type of dataflow analysis). Make it easy for a hiring chair in your area to quickly realize you’re one of theirs!

If a portal asks you to select research area keywords, it is to your advantage to be accurate. At many institutions, different groups of faculty will read different applications: for example, architecture faculty may read and evaluate architecture applications. If you are an architecture candidate who has one theory publication, checking both the architecture and theory boxes runs the risk that your application will be evaluated by theory professors, who may or may not know if ASPLOS and MICRO are good venues. This issue can be difficult to navigate for interdisciplinary applicants, and we recommend talking to your advisor about how to position yourself and using other mechanisms available to you (such as your cover letter and research statement) to further clarify your expertise.

Reasons you are excited about the position can include the type of school (public vs. private, R1 vs. liberal arts), the location, specific initiatives or centers related to your research, and past collaborations you’ve had with faculty at the institution. If someone on the inside told you to apply, be sure to mention it in your cover letter.

Kevin Leach notes that he prepared a generalized cover letter and then changed sentences to specialize it to each department, such as by listing faculty he knew. Kevin Angstadt notes that teaching-focused and research-focused positions may merit different cover letter contents.

For examples of cover letters, see the Example Materials tab.

Preparing Your Resume

Resume-writing is well-established, although many of the standard techniques aren’t as applicable at the Ph.D. level. For example, it’s our impression that your previous work experience may not matter as much. Instead, you want to emphasize your publications and any teaching experience you might have. Also list all of your references—sometimes people actually call your references to get more information.

A typical academic resume contains sections for publications, teaching, and service (e.g., paper reviewing, serving on departmental committees, or conference organizing). You might also include information on your experience with grant-writing, research mentorship, industrial internships, and any media coverage of your research.

Here are some concrete tips for organizing your resume or CV:

• Have an Opening Tag Line: We recommend using a short phrase at the top of your resume to contextualize your application. For example, Madeline led with:

  Combining software engineering with human factors and programming languages techniques to improve programmer productivity and wellbeing

• Emphasize Publications: Your publications and publication venues are very important. We recommend summarizing your publications in a sentence or two. As one example, Madeline wrote:

  16 peer-reviewed publications: 13 conference papers (ICSE, ESEC/FSE, PLDI, ASE, OOPSLA, etc.) including a distinguished paper award at ESEC/FSE, 3 peer-reviewed workshop papers. Four papers with undergraduate advisees, including three with student first authors. Three papers with interdisciplinary collaborators.

  Wes did not include this type of summary. If he were to apply again, he would include one because he saw people at interviews skim his resume for exactly this summary while he sat before them.

• Separate by Publication Type: We recommend organizing your publications by type (e.g., “Journal Articles,” “Refereed Conference Publications,” “Invited Articles”, “Workshops,” etc.). Listing all publications chronologically without distinguishing by venue type can appear disingenuous, and it can be annoying for the reader to spend time mentally sorting the list (since workshops “count less” than other venue types). To that end, be sure to separate short/workshop from full conference/journal publications. Claire included journal impact factors and conference acceptance rates. She also highlighted venue acronyms and applicable awards in the left-hand column of her publication list. These decisions were intended to make her CV easier to scan for this type of information, because interviewers look for it.

• Consider Section Summaries: Kevin Leach had applied to jobs as a “cross-disciplinary” researcher with a few years of postdoctoral experience. This led to a complicated list of publications and grants. Kevin found it helpful to have summaries at the top of each section to highlight which venues were relevant to which areas, which classes he had taught, and which grants were received at each institution.

• Teaching Qualifications: If you are applying for teaching positions (e.g., top-tier teaching academia, liberal arts college, instructor position), you should highlight your teaching qualifications—such as courses taught, courses designed, and numerical evaluation scores—early in your resume.

  As with reserach-focused position, the selectivity of a teaching-focused position will vary with context, including the quality and reputation of the school. For top-tier liberal arts colleges, Wes’s were the bare minimum required (e.g., they sufficed to get him an interview at Wesleyan) but they were mentioned as a concern (until he was able to convince them with his presentation) and he has no doubt that other teaching places rejected him because of them. By contrast, Kevin Angstadt’s and Hammad Ahmad’s materials represent more of an upper bound, resulting in very successful searches with multiple offers.

  Teaching jobs will also want multiple numerical evaluations. For example, Wes was asked explicitly what his numerical teaching evaluations were at Wesleyan, committees are also quite serious about it at other departments.

The importance of your resume: At many institutions, your resume might be the only document that makes it through the application process to the interviewers. During interviews, Wes often observed people reviewing his resume as he entered the room or while he was sitting down. In contrast, his research statement was rarely mentioned. Claire had similar experiences but notes that at some schools, interviewers had read at least one of her publications before meeting with her.

Example Resumes: For concrete examples of resumes and CVs, see the Example Materials tab.

Preparing Your Statements

Your statements are the core of your application. Almost all jobs for fresh Ph.D.’s require a Research Statement. Most academic jobs also require a Teaching Statement and a Diversity Statement.

General Advice for All Statements

1. Start Early: Writing these statements can take a surprisingly long time. Many people feel that their statements don’t fully reflect who they are as people. The job application process often forces a “putting yourself forward” or “please hire me” tone that may not feel authentic. Start early and seek regular feedback because your own draft efforts will invariably feel stupid to you.

2. Review Examples: Reviewing examples can help you understand what’s expected for the jobs you are applying for. It can also help you “face the tyranny of the blank page” and start writing. This Guide contains a collection of Example Materials that may help you get started. Additionally, consider asking friends and mentors who were recently on the job market to share their materials.

   Another strategy is to download examples from others who have recently applied for jobs. Many applicants post their materials on their websites, and a quick Google search (e.g., programming languages “teaching statement”) can yield hundreds of results. We recommend searching for and downloading last year’s materials the summer before you apply (e.g., May/June), before successful applicants remove them from their websites. Of course, if you get random people from the Internet you probably won’t have heard of them and thus won’t know if they are good or bad examples. So try to soak up all of the documents from people in your department that you can get a read on.

3. Focus on Structure: Ensure that your statements are well-organized with clear topic sentences and logical flow. Some faculty reviewers might skim your statements rather than reading them in full. Use bolding and other structural elements to make sure the main ideas are easy to grasp at a glance, and to encourage readers to engage more thoroughly with your application.

4. Make Your Statements Available Online: Make sure that your materials are available on your website. Even if you’ve officially sent in your materials, faculty reviewing your application may download them directly from your webpage, as official application systems can be difficult to navigate. In addition, many of your interviewers will look at your materials the day (or even hour) before they speak with you, and they will likely look on your website first.

We now detail each statement in turn.

Research Statement

The traditional approach here is to craft your research statement by summarizing your thesis proposal. These statements are typically 3-4 pages long and start with an overview of your research goals. They then discuss each main thrust of your thesis proposal. If you are applying for a teaching-focused job, such as in Liberal Arts academia, you might consider including a section on the role undergraduate mentorship plays in your research.

References aren’t required in a research statement, but they don’t hurt if you feel better including them ( or if you have a bunch of publications and want to highlight that). Kevin Leach notes that by the time he was applying for jobs, he had published across several disciplines. He used citations in his research statement to help the reader follow which publications were most relevant in constructing a coherent narrative.

For examples of research statements, see the Example Materials tab.

Teaching Statement

Teaching statements are typically 2-3 pages long, with longer being more common if you are going for a teaching-focused role.

They usually begin with an overview of your teaching philosophy, which communicates your beliefs about teaching and learning. This includes how you approach your role as an educator and how you engage with students. It may take some time to develop your teaching philosophy. If you are stuck, it can be helpful to brainstorm specific examples from your teaching experiences that you might want to talk about, and then think about if there are any underlying values connecting them. In the rest of your statement, you’ll want to summarize your teaching experience, and then demonstrate how your teaching philosophy is realized through compelling examples and anecdotes. Specificity is helpful.

It is not unusual for tenure track applicants to have relatively little explicit teaching experience. If you are applying for such a research-focused position, it’s also often beneficial to include your approach to mentoring junior researchers (with, again, specific examples). You can also signal awareness of modern pedagogy by educating yourself and using associated vocabular appropriately, without overdoing it; such awareness is nice to see in a tenure track applicant, as it can suggest thoughtfulness, even if you don’t have as much experience.

If you are going for a teaching-focused position, you may want to focus more on classroom teaching, and talk about your experience with lecturing and course design.

For examples of teaching statements, see the Example Materials tab.

Overall, most teaching statements tend to look somewhat similar. At Wesleyan, the only place Wes went that mentioned his teaching statement at all, they mentioned that it was creative and the best one they had seen in a while. Given how interesting his isn’t, that gives you a good idea for how low the bar is set if you want to do something personal with your teaching statement. Being yourself is still key, however. Not everyone should go for a teaching statement in which they claim not to be nice. Kevin Angstdat’s statement is something of an upper bound on teaching statement impressiveness, and a statement like his works well if you’re aiming for a teaching job.

Diversity Statement

Since 2015, Diversity Statements (or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statements) have become increasingly popular (sometimes given names like “Broader Impact” statements). These are typically 1-2 pages long and demonstrate your commitment to contributing to a supportive and inclusive environment. We provide additional guidance on these statements because they may be less familiar to applicants and because there may be less “institutional knowledge” about them.

In our personal opinion, the best diversity statements focus on actions you’ve taken for sustainable change and support rather than meaningless platitudes. For example, Madeline talked about organizing a speaker series to expose students to different CS careers, including metrics on attendance and and the positive feedback she received. However, some readers may expect a diversity philosophy at the start.

From the faculty side, Wes, who has chaired or been involved in Diversity Committees for many years at multiple institutions, and helped push for the consideration of Diversity Statements at Michigan, encourages you to place an emphasis on showing your understanding of the complexity and nuance of these issues, as well as the activities you have carried out (or plan to carry out) to improve climate and broaden participation in computing, rather than on your personal identity. Many institutions, especially some state schools, are forbidden from considering applicant identity directly. In that light, “I am a member of group XYZ” may be less compelling than “I founded a summer program to support XYZ students, and used my personal experience as a member of that group to focus activities on challenges ABC and DEF, which may disproportionately impact members of that population.”

When writing about activities, Wes further encourages you to include numbers and outcomes where possible. For example, list how many people attended your community-building event, quantify how participants found your speaker series helpful, count how many of the high school students you spoke to went on to apply to college, and so on. This may require planning in advance: if you have already done the hard work of bringing in and advertising a guest speaker, giving all of the attendees a survey with a few multiple choice (e.g., Likert scale) or freeform questions is not much more effort, but will strengthen your Diversity Statement. For example, a hiring committee choosing between applicants stating

I organized a community-building ice cream social for first-year XYZ students

and

I organized a community-building ice cream social for first-year XYZ students. 20 people attended and participants gave an average survey response of 4.6/5.0 to the statement “This event made me more likely to declare the CS major.” One participant wrote, “I thought there wouldn’t be anyone else like me in CS, but I met some fun people here.”

… will almost certainly find the second to be more compelling. In addition, we encourage you to include any evidence that your efforts have spanned multiple years and that they will continue without you. Informally, administrations often see diversity activities as falling into a “graveyard of broken dreams”, where one enthusiastic person runs an activity for one cycle and then graduates or moves on, and the activity falls apart without that leader. Evidence that you have trained replacements, secured funding, or otherwise started something that will continue to operate “on its own” will look particularly attractive. Because hiring committees are looking to hire you for many years, and institutions often make decisions about which programs to continue based on these considerations (e.g., how many people did it help, to what degree did it help them, how much did it cost in terms of time or resources, can it be sustained, etc.), including that sort of information in your essay will make it easier for the committee to conclude that you align with their institutional practices.

Concretely, many US universities have recently produced, adapted and refined rubrics for evaluating Diversity Statements. Many of these show a convergence of ideas and best practices. For example, the Michigan State Univeristy rubric is based on the University of California at Berkeley rubric, which was itself adapted by the University of California at Irvine, etc. Using these rubrics to guide the construction of your Diversity Statement is thus more likely to result in a single statement that is assessed positively at multiple institutions. Some of these rubrics can be harder to find on the web (e.g., they may be structured for faculty hiring committees, not for applicants), so we have archived three public examples here for your convenience:

• University of Colorado, Denver — DEI Statement Rubric
• University of California, Irvine — DEI Statement Rubric
• Michigan State Univeristy — DEI Statement Rubric

For examples of diversity statements, see the Example Materials tab.

Selecting Indicative Publications

Some schools will ask for you to submit up to three indicative publications. As discussed earlier, most interviewers will go to your website first to look at your materials. As a result, the specific publications that you choose to include in your application may not be too important.

However, it is worth being a little strategic. We recommend picking publications that are published in higher-tier venues and align with how you are positioning yourself on the job market. For example, if you are aiming for Software Engineering positions, you might want to focus on publications from venues like the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) or Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) that you plan to focus on in your job talk. We recommend that you include at least one first-authored paper. However, not all of them need to be first-authored (at least if you are in PL or SE).

Submitting Your Application

Nothing surprising here. Email it in or otherwise make use of the online form system in question. Often they will ask for everything to be in PDF format. Sometimes they’ll even want everything in a single PDF file, so be prepared to be able to combine PDFs if needed.

Now that you have written and submitted your application materials, the next step is interviewing!.