By Jackie Kelly, revised by Sarah Hildebrand

Image by chenspec on Pixabay

By now we’re all aware of the challenging reality of the academic job market. Although a graduate degree no longer guarantees you a faculty position, that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. What it does mean is that you must be able to show potential employers—in both your job documents and subsequent interviews—the skills and experiences that make you stand out from other applicants. As you begin brainstorming for your academic cover letter, it’s important to reflect on your accomplishments and identify key strengths to highlight.

Not sure what your strengths are? Try this exercise:

Explore Your Academic Strengths

Take a look at the 7 categories below and spend 10 minutes per category writing out everything you can say about your experience in each. This exercise will take a solid hour, but it will allow you to assess your strengths in many areas.

1. Research

Explain your engagement in research, whether it’s your own doctoral research or supporting the efforts of a faculty member. Identify the research question or main argument, its importance to the field, your methodology, and your role in the research process.

2. Journal articles & conference presentations

If you’ve had work accepted to a scholarly publication or presented at a conference, write down where the projects appeared, their titles, and a short description of each. Articulate the relationship these projects have to each other.

3. Funding

University employers love hearing about fundraising successes. If you haven’t yet crossed the hurdle of securing external funding, think about what fellowships and grants you’ve been awarded through the GC. If you have secured a grant, have a fellowship, had a fellowship, or are in the process of applying for a fellowship or grant, list these and summarize what they’ve allowed you to do or learn.

4. Teaching

List the courses you’ve taught and where you’ve taught them. Describe your pedagogical approach, what you do particularly well in the classroom, and what courses you’d like to teach in the future.

5. Certificate programs/trainings

The GC offers certificate programs that doctoral students can complete in addition to their doctoral degree, as well as a wide variety of skill-building workshops such as those sponsored by GC Digital Initiatives or the Teaching and Learning Center. These supplementary courses and trainings can provide even greater depth to your expertise or offer a complementary skill set and perspective that sets you apart from other applicants. Write down the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired outside of traditional coursework.

6. Service

If you have served on a committee or taken on a leadership role at the Graduate Center, perhaps through the DSC or within your program, list out these roles and explain what you helped accomplish. It’s useful to provide evidence that you contribute to the institution you’re a part of and don’t just show up for your classes and go home.

Community service falls into this category, as well. If you have a consistent, long-standing commitment to a volunteer organization, describe the organization and how you’ve contributed to its mission.

7. Professional appointments

Something that often gets overlooked in the effort to make ourselves desirable job candidates is the value of demonstrating that you know how to function in a professional environment and be a good colleague. Some of the work you’ve done in industry might also complement the work you do as an academic. List out the other jobs you’ve had either before or during graduate school and brainstorm how they might make you an even stronger candidate for a faculty position.

Reflect

Once you’ve completed this exercise, take a moment to reflect on what you’ve written. If you had a lot to say about particular categories or found they were easy to write about, that’s a good sign that those are your strengths and that you should foreground this information in your cover letter. These same topics should also be highlighted in subsequent interviews. Conversely, if you had trouble writing about some categories, you shouldn’t necessarily leave those topics out of your cover letter. Rather, you should begin brainstorming ways to address areas that could be perceived as gaps in your application.