Overview of Materials

Writing application materials for post-doctoral positions can be challenging. To help you get started, this page offers a variety of examples and resources tailored for different types of jobs, including:

• R1 Tenure-Track Positions
• Liberal Arts Tenure-Track Positions
• Industrial Research Positions

We provide examples of the main application components, as well as complete application portfolios. The portfolios are organized by date, with the newest listed first. Additionally, all materials can be filtered by key attributes, such as primary research area(s), dual career situations, and job type. Please consider our advice on nuance when comparing to these materials.

We thank everyone who contributed their materials to this project. If you are interested in contributing your materials, please see our contribution guide.

Searchable Materials

Comparisons, Nuance, and A Technique

While these example materials can be helpful, we encourage you to consider them with care, lest they mislead you. Wes notes that most academics suffer from imposter syndrome. Other job applicants’ materials can easily lead to a mental trap wherein you read them and think “I have fewer publications than Person A and less teaching experience than Person B, I’ll never get a job!” You may not have noticed that Person A had no teaching experience, or that Person B, no service contributions. Beware of comparing your entire self to only the best attributes of others, and remember that application materials serve to highlight the best, most hirable properties of a candidate. They effectively never include mistakes, failures or weaknesses. (Consider Melanie Stefan’s notion of a CV of Failures as a useful contrast!)

This page provides neither a random nor indicative sample of applicants, and the materials are biased towards top-tier outcomes across multiple categories of positions. These may be the right kinds of jobs for you to consider, but they also might not be, for your career and personal goals! As a concrete example, Stephanie Forrest received R1 tenure-track offers from both the University of Michigan and also the University of Arizona and accepted the offer at Arizona because it was a better fit for her context.

In evaluating your own choices and possible outcomes, we encourage you to consider:

• Opportunity costs relative to the job you’re actually seeking. There is simply not enough time to do everything during your graduate career. If you are looking for a teaching-focused position, at a certain point, serving as instructor of record in a course may be more useful than any number of additional peer-reviewed publications. Conversely, if you are looking for an industrial research position, spending a summer or two interning is likely much more useful than teaching a class. Etc.
• Grounded information about the relationship between department selectivity and general applicant profile. Leaving aside the (important) conversation about whether rankings mean anything/are moral/useful, etc, higher-ranked/”bigger-named” institutions often, on average, expect “more” of successful faculty applicants. One way you can get a feeling for this in academia is to go to the websites of schools you are considering, find recently-hired faculty, download their CVs/check DBLP, and then only consider the resume items and publications they had by the year they were hired. For example, you might compare recently-hired faculty at the University of Michigan to those at the Univeristy of New Mexico to develop a broad sense of expectations.

The latter suggestion serves to help you mitigate your imposter syndrome while giving you the information necessary to make good job search and career choices. Wes recommends that applicants seeking academic jobs sit down (perhaps with their advisors) and determine that “on average, my record is comparable to people who are hired at schools ranked XYZ”. Then start, as a baseline, by applying to other schools in a distribution around XYZ, but also include some “safety schools” that may be less selective, and some “aspirational schools” that may be more selective, plus schools that are particularly interested in (e.g., are building a center in, have a history of strength in, etc.) an area that aligns with their expertise.

How to Contribute Materials

We are always looking for more application material profiles, especially for job-types or job-locations that are currently under-represented in our guide.

If you are interesting in contributing your materials, please fill out our contribution form available here. This form includes places to upload PDFs of your materials, as well as add any information you’d like to better contextualize your application for readers. In this form, you can also indicate if you’d like to be kept anonymous. All materials are optional – we greatly appreciate anything you’d be willing to share!

If you have any questions about contributing, please email Madeline Endres at mendres@umass.edu.