Take the lead in shaping the narrative of you who are. For example, what is it you study? Are you a scholar of globalization? Social movements? Race? What is the overarching question your research addresses? Even if the content of your publications covers particular topics, and it seems obvious to you who you are as a scholar, you need to specify in your cover letter what it is you study. As Whitehead suggests, you should walk your reader through the narrative you want to tell of who you are as a scholar.
Don’t presuppose that faculty members are reading your application holistically, or that if you mentioned something in a research statement, you won’t have to repeat it in the cover letter. Here are some tips that I hope you’ll find helpful.ĭon’t assume knowledge on the part of the reader. The cover letter may be the first thing search committee members see, alongside the CV, so you want to make sure that it captures their attention in a good way. students need to remember about the academic cover letter is its purpose: to introduce who you are as a scholar, what you would bring to the department as a potential colleague and how you fit the requirements listed in the advertisement. It’s meant to be helpful for those new on the job market, as the following advice may seem obvious to those who have been in academe for a while. This essay draws on an invited prep talk on how to write a cover letter that I gave at the 2019 American Sociological Association’s annual meeting and on my own experience as a job applicant and as a faculty member on search committees.
At the very least, I find having multiple perspectives, styles of writing and exposure to different ways of thinking about the same topic to be useful.
I want to build on the foundational advice of those before me and provide additional insight into the purpose of a cover letter, tips for writing a successful one and what to avoid in it. Indeed, a simple Google search on “how to write an academic cover letter” brings back 49,600 results if the clause is in quotations, and 526 million results without quotations. Ball, for example, provides excellent advice and a paragraph-by-paragraph breakdown. Others have also written about writing a cover letter. He also stressed the importance of strong lead sentences, using the cover letter to highlight and point to other parts of your application, and controlling the narrative you want to tell. He suggested among other things, keeping it at a suggested length (one and a half to two pages) and avoiding jargon. For the cover letter, he gave excellent advice. Sociologist Andrew Whitehead started a Twitter thread some months ago detailing his take on various stages of the academic job market.
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