3. The job application

As I said in the last article I didn't tailor my application to any particular school and instead submitted the same packet to each school. When starting out I asked a few of my recently hired friends for their applications to get a sense of how they are put together. I submitted a cover letter (spend some time on this), my CV, a list of references, and a Description of research and previous experience.

Here is an outline of my Research and Previous Experience document, which I submitted as one document (total 5 pages: 3 pages of research proposal, 1.5 pages of past research experience, and .5 pages of references).

1. Title. Mine was actually pretty boring "Biophysical Studies of the Prokaryotic Cytoskeleton". It probably wouldn't hurt to make this a bit catchy, but I should also describe you work seriously.


2. Background and Significance. This was basically an abstract for my research description (~200 words). It described what the basic questions are for what I was proposing to do as a faculty and why they are important in the grand scheme of things. I spent a good amount of time on this one. This an all following sections included literature references, and a bibliography was included at the end (total of 12 references).


3. Specific Research Objectives. I had three specific aims which I listed in a numbered list. Each entry was a ~150 word paragraph describing the single question and experiment for that aim.


4. Detailed Research Plan. This section started with a paragraph on what technology I was going to focus on developing in the lab (i.e. high-resolution yada yada) and then had expanded sections for each of the three aims. These parts were a few paragraphs long and went into some detail about the background as well as the specific measurements I was proposing to make.


5. Funding Sources and Long-term Goals. This statement included a paragraph on what government agencies I plan on hitting up for money and a paragraph on what general topics I see myself moving towards on a longer (maybe 10-15 year) time scale. I was told that many schools want to know that you've thought of these issues, so having this section makes that clear.


6. Previous Research Experience. This is sort of the second part of the document and described my research in both graduate school and postdoc. In general I highlighted my "big splash" papers, but also the experience I had in a scientific leadership role in the lab.

Comments:
I found the previous research part hard to write. In this whole process you have to really talk yourself up, which is not something you usually spend doing in science, at least not directly. For example, you're writing things like "I did this", and "My research is so great". This takes some getting used to, but you need to do it both in the application and the interviews.

Also, your research proposal should be broad enough to cover 5+ years of interesting research, but also concrete enough that its clear you can hit the ground running. It took me many iterations to get this right and passing the proposal around to friends and colleagues (especially current faculty) really helped a lot.