What are You Looking for? (When you’re looking at application materials, that is.)

If you’ve served on a search committee for a tenure-track position in the last five years, would you take a minute and answer some of the following questions (either in the comments or you can email them to me):

1. What do you look for when you read a job letter from a junior scholar?

2. What do you look for when you read a CV from a junior scholar?

3. What do you look for when you read a teaching statement or statement of teaching effectiveness?

4. What do you look for when you read a research statement?

5.What do you think is the most important thing a graduate student can do to prepare for the job market?

6. What makes a good job talk?

7. How do you read job materials from someone not in your field (i.e. you’re a cultural anthropologist hiring a biological anthropologist)?

8. How is searching for a tenured position (i.e. already associate or full) different than searching for a junior scholar?

It seems to me that over the last few years, there’s been a real intensification of genres in job letters and related material — a generic trend I’ve probably promulgated as much as diagnosed. But it also seems like these generic trends might not actually be meeting the expectations of people who serve on job search committees. You can see my posts on most of the above topics by clicking on the hyperlinks above — a direct response to any of the topics would be great.

This is officially Phase Two of the professionalization end of this blog, in which I’m hoping to collect answers to the above questions from academics at a variety of institutions and from assistant to associate and full professors. When I have enough answers to each of the above questions, I’ll compile them into new posts to run parallel to my more proscriptive ones. Hopefully, taken as a set, these will give job seekers a clear sense of what each of these documents do and how they might be changing.

(Incidentally, and there might be a future post on this — the intensification of genre in academic job materials seems a lot like what Norbert Elias describes in relation to etiquette in The Civilizing Process, which might be a good thing to read if you’re on the job market these days…)

Thanks — and stay tuned.