Why should we hire you as an assistant professor in our program?
This is the daunting question I need to answer with everything that is required when applying to jobs. Although varying in length and amount of documents required, generally, I am uploading a most-up-to-date C.V., a cover letter, a statement on my teaching philosophy, a statement on research and at least one publication sample.
As the anxiety of being on the academic market creeps up, I have to remind myself that success is not defined by securing the job, but rather by submitting the best application possible. Too often, I compare myself to others or think I am not good enough. Open-rank positions terrify me. Why would they choose a junior scholar over someone more experienced? Will my graduate school grants compare to a senior scholar who has secured fellowships and foundation grants?
When it gets overwhelming, I try to remind myself what it was like being on search committees as an undergraduate. During that experience, I learned that generally, there is some niche or type of scholar that a given committee is looking for that may not be in the application information. While some applications may emphasize seeking a scholar who uses certain methodologies, or whose work is social justice-oriented, the culture of the department, the students they serve and what the general community thinks their institution needs in a new professor all play a major role in the decision-making for hiring.
Here is some advice I have learned from my mentors or by participating in search committees:
Institutional type matters, but don’t expect them all to follow a stereotype.
As a graduate student at a research-intensive school, I feel like we are socialized into prioritizing other research-intensive institutions. We learn that these institutions are hubs of research productivity in that they received substantial amount of funding for being research-intensive, along with the grants that their faculty are likely to obtain.
