In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 11 Additional Application Materials About Your Research Dissertation Abstract You may be asked to provide an abstract of your dissertation as part of the initial screening process for a faculty position. Or you may wish to provide it with your application whether or not you are specifically asked for it. Your abstract should conform to the conventions for your field. It is usually one or two pages long. Make the abstract, and therefore your dissertation , sound interesting and important. Use the active rather than the passive construction whenever possible, and stress findings and conclusions where they exist. Rather than saying, ‘‘A possible relationship between x and y was studied,’’ say, for example, ‘‘Demographic data indicate that x increased as y declined.’’ Briefly indicate how your research fits into a broader context to answer the implicit ‘‘Why should anyone care?’’ question that may be asked of any piece of research. Someone who reads your abstract should have a clear idea of what your work entailed and want to ask you more about it. Write, rewrite, and seek critiques from your advisor and others in your department until you’re satisfied that the abstract will achieve this effect. Research Statement Like an abstract, this short summary (usually one or two pages) may be requested as part of the application process. At other times, you may choose to include it to strengthen your application. Preparing this document is wonderful practice for interviews (see Chapter 14, ‘‘Interviewing’’), because employers are keenly interested in what you plan to do in the future. It is not expected that you will have begun to do research beyond your dissertation or your current postdoctoral work, only that you will have begun to think about it coherently. If you plan to publish your research as several articles or turn it into a 118 Written Materials for the Search book, you may mention that fact briefly. Be sure, however, to discuss plans for research that extend beyond what you’re doing now. If your plans sound simply like extensions of your current work, or if you use phrases like ‘‘We do this,’’ then you risk giving the impression that you view your plans as an extension of your advisor’s research and that you have not begun to think of yourself as an independent researcher. Give a brief context for your research interests, including how they fit into work others have done, and then discuss your plan for investigation. It is very important to communicate a sense that your research will follow logically from what you have done and be different, important, and innovative . Describing plans at an appropriate level of generality/specificity may require some rewriting and feedback from faculty members. A research plan so specific that one article could complete it is too limited, but one that includes a whole area of study, for example, ‘‘labor economics,’’ is too general. If you will require substantial facilities and/or external funding for your research, include that in your discussion. If you’ve identified funding organizations likely to support your research plans, indicating that this is the case will make your plan sound more credible. If this document makes the reader want to ask you further questions, even challenge you, it has done its job admirably, because it has helped make it seem that an interview with you would be lively and interesting. Write as clearly and concisely as you can. While of course it would be unethical for members of a hiring committee to appropriate a candidate’s detailed research plans for their own research, candidates have at least suspected this has happened to them. Find your own balance between talking about your research plans specifically enough to be credible and abstractly enough to protect your interest in your own creative ideas. Dissertation Chapter or Other Writing Sample In some fields a writing sample is requested as a matter of course, and you should be preparing one as you prepare your other job hunting materials. In other fields these documents are usually requested only after an initial screening, and it isn’t to your advantage to send them unsolicited. In deciding what to send, choose something that is interesting and stands on its own, even if it is part of a longer document. If you send a long chapter, you might want to enclose a note directing readers’ attention to a particular section of it, since, in reality, many committee...

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