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Attention conservation notice: Job suggestions from a soon to be jobless man.
Nowadays I am in postdoc-hunting mode and I am writing applications to find a position. The very first thing I check before writing to a potential supervisor is, his/her requirement in an application. One of the most common, but an important, requirement is CoverLetter. However, this might not always be the case as I also observed other synonyms for it such as Letter of interest. This is often a confusing part where the applicant might not be aware of the format of these documents and searching for them on the internet is a disaster.
It took me quite some time (based on genius Google!!) to learn that the definition of these terms changes from academic to non-academic matters. For a research position, these synonyms often refer to the same document where one needs to express briefly his/her intention of writing with a description of previous research experiences, while for a non-academic matter, the cover letter is just a letter describing what you want.
Another important thing, I have observed—based on the research application my supervisor receives—is that there are a lot of people who just copy-paste the subject matter from one application to another without even proper proofreading. Although copying seems obvious as no one wants to rewrite the same text again, no proofreading does not. Sending a document to an academic who spends time a lot of time reading and writing grants and research articles with keen eyes seems stupid to me. Even on skimming he can find mistakes and you lose your only chance.
Copypasting also has other problems as it is less likely that two researchers work exactly on the same problems. If you do not carefully rewrite the Cover Letter/Letter of Interest and merely copy-paste, it can be easily observed in primary skimming.
So I have two key suggestions: first please proofread the document many-many times to ignore mistakes including grammatical ones. The second one is to personalize the subject matter according to the potential supervisor's research interest. Finally, one additional suggestion I have is to be delicate while referring to the question "What do you like in his/her work?" as you can not possibly know all his/her work without being involved in that research.
The above suggestions do not guarantee you success in finding a postdoc position but for sure increase your chances of being considered seriously.
So happy writing and Good luck for future applications.
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Posted at: Wed, 12 Feb 2025 07:42 GMT
category: /weblog/posts