Timeline for On mentioning recommenders' names in cover letter for postdoctoral applications
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
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| Apr 1, 2013 at 0:32 | comment | added | KConrad | If someone applied for a job through Mathjobs and did not include a cover letter at all, it would look unprofessional, just as much as applying for a job ouside academia and not including a cover letter. Even if it is a minor part of the application (certainly compared to the recommendation letters and research statement), it should be written. Most of the time it'll be the same letter at all schools. | |
| Apr 1, 2013 at 0:29 | comment | added | KConrad | I would not advise someone to ignore writing a cover letter. If you have a reason for the job fitting well with your situation that is not mathematical (e.g., geographic or family reasons), the cover letter is a good place to put it. That's also a good place to mention faculty at the school you are applying to with whom you would be interested in working (if it's not a job directly tied to a specific person or group already). Usually when I download an application from Mathjobs, it has a cover letter. I think 99% of the time when I look, it's there. | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 23:50 | history | edited | Igor Pak | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
update
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| Mar 31, 2013 at 20:23 | comment | added | Andreas Blass | I second what pranavk wrote about the importance of the choice of subject area. For example, if an applicant in set-theoretic topology lists set theory (or logic) as the area, I'll see the application. If the area is listed as topology, the application will go to topologists, some (thought not quite all) of whom consider the long line as the extreme of pathology. | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 13:41 | comment | added | Russ Woodroofe | @Igor: The cover letter is where you get to tell the story of why you'd fit well into this particular job. (Or at least to show that you've read the advertisement.) That's what Alexander is talking about, I think. I didn't like jumping through that hoop when I was on the market, but ignoring it is not advised. I have heard of other schools using the cover letter as the basis for an early winnowing. | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 12:38 | comment | added | user9072 | In addition to what Dima Pasechnik said, I would like to stress that the question was: can I. (Okay, 'can' is not a very good word here IMO, but still I think the question is clearly to be read as 'would it be harmful/very strange to include them'.) | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 6:53 | comment | added | Dima Pasechnik | It seems that he's interested in postdoc in Europe, and not many places in Europe use mathjobs. In fact, the postdoc market in Europe is quite different from the one in USA, as there are lots of grant-funded postdocs, tied up to particular topics, and relatively few equivalents to USA instructorships. | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 6:23 | comment | added | Igor Pak | @Alexander Woo - This is backwards, in my opinion. First, the research statement should have an abstract with a clear concise summary. That's the right place to put it, not in the cover letter. Second, if an applicant wants to emphasize different part of their research or teaching experience, they should produce different research and/or of teaching statements. Mathjobs allows you to have several such files stored and customize which statement goes where. Again, the cover letter is redundant. | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 6:05 | comment | added | user30379 | @Michael: I have no idea why MathJobs asks for cover letters, though it could be that for some purposes it is more relevant and the system is "one size fits all". For instance, Alexander Woo describes such a situation that never would have occurred to me (since I always read the actual research and teaching statements of any file that I look at, expecting the first page of each to include some kind of synopsis for the non-expert -- I never would have imagined that such synopses should be found in a cover letter!). | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 5:21 | comment | added | Alexander Woo | their research statement, which helped since we were hiring specifically in applied algebra. Some applicants also used part of their cover letter to convince us they were interested teaching our population of students; they couldn't do so in their teaching statement since that was used for a much broader range of types of schools. | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 5:17 | comment | added | Alexander Woo | I strongly disagree with what you have written about the cover letter. Beyond having a reasonable number of publications, what I looked for in our search this year was an indication that the applicant fit our position, and the easiest place to see this was the one paragraph synopses of research and teaching in the cover letter. (The research and teaching statements are too long for a first screening.) Customization of cover letters clearly made a difference. Some relatively pure algebraists made a case for their involvement with applications in their cover letter that they did not in... | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 5:08 | comment | added | Michael Biro | This doesn't come across at all from the applicant side of the MathJobs setup. If what you're saying is true, why even ask for a mandatory cover letter at all? | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 4:10 | comment | added | user30379 | Yes, since MathJobs lists all recommenders who have sent or even will be sending (in an ideal world...) recommendation letters, and which ones have arrived or not, it is a complete waste of time provide this information in cover letters for applications through MathJobs. In over 10 years of reading postdoc job files, I never looked at a cover letter. The choice of "primary subject area" is much more important, as that affects who actually looks at your file (e.g., the subject area "[0] General Math" should be banished, as surely all it does is ensure career suicide). | |
| Mar 31, 2013 at 4:00 | history | edited | user29283 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
changed "shore" to "chore"
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| Mar 31, 2013 at 3:33 | history | answered | Igor Pak | CC BY-SA 3.0 |