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This repo contains some templates for creating your vitae (academic and professional), research, teaching, and diversity statements, and your cover letter. I also included a spreadsheet (Jobs.xlsx) that I used to keep track of job postings, if my letter writers had submitted their letter, links to the post, and other things.
Plan ahead, stay calm, you are doing everything right. Congratulations for making it this far in your career and I am excited for the things you are going to go on to do. Believe in yourself!
I chose to have an Overleaf project for each of these. That way, when I downloaded (or pushed to GitHub if you are hosting everything there), the project name would already be the necessary final file name. For example, I had a project titled Parthum_Vitae that would produce Parthum_Vitae.pdf, making the use of this file direct and simple to upload to applications. Find what works best for you (but also, don't be the person that uploads a file like My_cv_v4 (1).pdf, just don't do it).
In this folder you will find templates for both an academic vitae (academic.tex) and professional/industry resume (industry.tex).I have left some of my information and entries in there to get you started. In general, if you have a lot of accomplishments, awesome! But if you don't, don't water down the few good things by adding the many little things just to make your CV longer. Only include things that are important. Committees are reading 400+ CV's and you want them to know what is important, not everything.
Academic CV's can be as long as they need—although for the market you will typically try to keep it to four pages (two pieces of paper) so committees can manage all of these things. Remember, your goal is to make the committee want to interview you, not to show them how many pieces of paper you can make them print (unless that's the job you're applying for, then go nuts).
Professional resumes are typically two pages (one piece of paper). Many people will tell you to keep it to one page, and that's fine, too. The general motivation behind keeping it to one page (one side of one piece of paper) is that a hiring manager might not even look beyond the first page. But IMO, that's their fault for not being more interested in doing their job well.
Again, find what works for you.
In this folder you will find three templates. They all use the same formatting, but I have included all three to share the items and information that I chose to include in each. The text should be personal to you. You will probably rewrite these a dozen times until you are happy with how they read. The folder contains the temlpate for a research statement (Research_Statement.tex), teaching statement (Teaching_Statement.tex), and a diversity statement (Diversity_Statement.tex).
Many institutions only request the first two. Some institutions only provide a spot for one general statement. In the case of the latter, I would group all three statements together and submit one statement file that included all three. Do what you think is appropriate and what works best for you.
This folder contains one cover letter template. I chose to use the same template for all applications (academic, LA schools, federal, postdocs, and industry). Inside of this template I typically had one paragraph that would be a foundation for all letters. I then had a block section for each type of institution/agency that the letter would be written to. I found this to work well for me and all 130+ applications I submitted. You might find otherwise.
Many people will use a single template for all letters. They would then loop through a database of job listings and simply have a script replace the necessary fields. I realize this brings the marginal cost of an application to near zero. I am not a fan of this type of approach to a job search. I catered my letters to each institution, including faculty or colleagues that I would like to work with or projects that I am particularly excited about. This made the application process much longer, but much more personal. It worked well for me and I knew that I was deeply interested in every application I submitted. Find what works for you: either a shotgun approach—apply to everything—or the more piecewise approach of applying to only the jobs you are excited about.
There is also varying advice on how long the cover letter should be. I went great lengths to make some letters a single page (one side of one page) and even went as far as making some 10pt font (not very kind to your reader, both ableist and ageist). I eventually became comfortable with two pages (two sides of one piece of paper), which allowed for both 12pt font and a more personalized letter to the committee. For most applications I would say two pages is more than fine. For some industry-type jobs or postdocs, you might keep it short, sweet, and direct.
This is a spreadsheet that I created to help me keep track of job postings, closing dates, letters, etc. It is pretty self-explanatory, but here are a few tips. There are four worksheets (Jobs, Postdocs, Responses, and Data). I chose to keep full-time positions separate from postdocs, just for bookkeeping purposes. I also kept a worksheets for the responses in case there was additional information that was requested, or about the date and time of the interview. This way I wasn't frantically searching through emails to find something important, or even worse, missing an interview all together.
The data (do not change) worksheet is one that the other worksheets reference in their date column. This is how I color-code items that are approaching their deadline. The parameters can be changed. For example, if you want the entry to change to yellow when the due date is 7 days away, instead of the 14 as I have it set now, you would simply change cell A2 to =TODAY()+7 instead of =TODAY()+14.
The software code contained within this repository is made available under the MIT license. The data and figures are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.