Faculty Application Advice 

The faculty application process is a confusing and opaque process. In an effort to make sure everyone has equal access to information on how to apply, I’ve put together some of the advice I’ve gotten along with my own experiences. Note that this is chiefly aimed at academics in electrical engineering / mechanical engineering / computer science applying for tenure-track positions at an R1 research university, so there may be differences in the process depending on your field/interests. The most useful resources to talk to will people people who were recently hired in your particular area. If there is just one piece of advice I could give in this entire page it would be to not be afraid to ask the experts around you for advice and help in clarifying the process.

If you have suggestions for changes/additions to this information, please reach out to me!

My application materials (zip file)

Before Applying

Conferences

  • If you have a conference coming up, see who is going to the conference at schools you’re interested in.  Email them and see if you can meet to chat about their university.  Ask them to consider attending your talk.

Gathering Data

  • Sit on faculty interview committees, follow up to see who got offers

  •  Watch dissertation talks, especially for those who went through the academic process (and either got one or didn’t get one.  Often the talks of those who didn’t get positions are more insightful)

  • Ask connections (especially those who applied recently) to send you their statements

 Making Connections at your favorite universities

  • It’s very useful to have someone who knows you at the department where you’re applying.  You can ping this person when you submit your application and they’ll make sure it actually gets reviewed seriously.

  • Hard to say the best way to establish these connections.  Conference and inviting people to your university to give a talk are both good methods.

  •  Some recommend visiting a university in the year leading up to your application to give a technical talk.  Others strongly advise against it.

Finding Job Openings

Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a central database for engineering academic job postings. I went to each department at each university that I cared about, and found their page where they list job opening for faculty. I saved these links and just checked them regularly throughout August-January.

  • You can apply to more than one department at a university

  • If there is a posting that doesn’t quite match your background, don’t worry about it too much. If the search committee thinks your work is cool, they may want to interview you even if your work doesn’t match exactly. If you’re concerned, try reaching out to the search chair (if they are listed) and/or another faculty member in your area to ask if they think you should apply given your background.

The Application

CV

  • Consider adding the percent acceptance rates at conferences so those who are not in your area know if those conferences are a big deal

  • Consider adding the students you’ve mentored

  • Review activities (conference/journals that you’ve reviewed papers for)

Research statement

  • 3-5 pages (in my area)

  • DO NOT MAKE THIS OVERLY TECHNICAL. It should be easy to follow by someone in the department who is outside your field.

  • First ~1/3rd of the first page should be somewhat self-contained, i.e. if I skim just this part I should get the 30-second gist of what you do and what you want to accomplish in your career

  • A figure or two is nice for clarity. Some people also color-code their sections or otherwise try to break it up visually.

  • Must be broad, but also appealing to experts

    • 2-year plan (hit the ground running) mostly on this

    • 5-year plan (will get you tenure) vague

    • 10-year plan (pie-in-the-sky ideas) a couple sentences

  • What it should cover

    • Importance: why should people outside the area care?

    • Impact: has anyone noticed the work?

    • Evidence: pointers to papers, awards, etc

    • Vision: does your field have a future?

    • If you’ve developed any software/patents/etc you can note them too

Teaching statement

  • Review teaching experience (if any), add any awards and teaching evaluations that are favorable

    • Can also list tutorials and workshops at conferences if you don’t have much teaching experience

    • Consider adding quotes from students (if you don’t have room, you can also ask your letter writers to add quotes from students)

  • Usually there is expected to be some sort of “teaching philosophy” section (in my area at least)

    • provide examples if possible of how you’ve applied this philosophy in practice

  • Future teaching

    • Conflicting advice: some say to list specific courses you could teach at the university.  Others suggest just listing general areas that you could teach in (so that professors who are possessive of certain classes won’t feel like you’re encroaching on them)

    • Name idea(s) for new course(s)

  • Mentoring

    • Describe mentoring experiences

 

Diversity Statement

  • Guidelines at www.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversity

  • Make it easy for a reader to grab little highlights from your statement.  A real example of a quote that a hiring committee used to summarize a diversity statement is “inclusive environment, mentoring women, outreach”

  • Can talk about efforts you’ve made that help all grad students, including those from underrepresented backgrounds.  For example, reaching out to the students who have failed the midterm to set them up with extra tutoring and support. This example isn’t something that explicitly targets people from diverse backgrounds, but will certainly help create an environment that supports diversity.

 

Letter Writers

  • Definitely get writers who can say strong things about your research

  • Some recommend getting a letter writer who is familiar with your field but can provide a slightly more outside view (e.g. a professor at another university who is familiar with your work but you haven’t published with)

  • Requesting letters

    • Over the summer (July-ish), send a quick email saying that you’re applying and requesting a letter from them because of blablabla.  Ask if they feel comfortable writing a strong letter on your behalf

    • If they say yes, respond saying you’ll follow up in the fall with details

    • In the fall, send an email with the following:

      • Latest versions of your statements

      • List of where you are applying and their deadlines for letters

      • Any information that will help them with writing the letter (e.g. for someone who is writing about your teaching, give them an overview of your duties when you TA’d for them and the resulting student reviews)

    • I sent each reviewer a google spreadsheet with where I wanted the reviewer to send letters and a column where I marked if/when I heard they submitted their letter

What happens on the University’s end (modeled on UC Berkeley EECS)

Before Application Deadline

  • Department forms search committee in the summer

  • Search ad usually written end of summer / beginning of fall

  • Staffer writes search ad, gets approved by committee, then published in early fall

  • Deadlines are November/December -- definitely check the deadlines of the different places

  • In fall, committee mostly focused on making everyone apply

 

After Application Deadline

  • In January, the committee meets every week to review

  • One person from each area on the committee.  This person is responsible for reading all applications in that area

  • They form a long list, which gets demolished in like 2 weeks to create a short list

  • Committee person from area X presents to rest of committee on all of the candidates form area X on the short list.  Usually done with a short 4-page presentation (overview, research, teaching, service/diversity)

  • Interviewees can start hearing back as early as December or as late as April 

Interviews

Preparation

  • When you first find out about the interview, ask about the general structure of the interview.  If they have chalk talks or teaching talks it’s useful to find out early.

  • Ask for a draft of the schedule early on so you can start researching people.  Can even ask friends who these people are.

  • Note: many hotels have printers/a business center that you can use if you’re running behind on preparing or need to print a last-minute schedule change

  • Things I brought to the hotel

    • Sunscreen (I’m very fair and some of the places involve a walking tour outdoors)

    • Bluetooth headphones and wired headphones (for plugging into the plane entertainment systems)

    • Tea bags (both caffeinated and decaffeinated) for the night before and the morning of

    • Ear plugs and an eye mask in case the hotel was loud/bright

    • Cough drops in case I got sick (which I did during one interview)

    • Download a map of the area

  • Things I brought to the interview in my laptop bag

    • Things that I used

      • Binder with notes/paper to write on (more details later)

      • Presenter/clicker

      • Adapter(s) for projector

      • Travel mug filled with water/tea

      • Ibuprofen

      • chapstick

      • Business cards

      • Pens

      • Cliff bars (or other fast snack)

      • Tissues

      • Sunglasses

    • Things that I didn’t use but was glad I had

      • Laptop charger

      • Hard copy of my slides

      • flashdrive with my slides

      • Slides uploaded to the cloud

      • Comb, extra hair ties

      • pads/tampons

      • Tide stick

      • Breath mints

      • Whiteboard markers

      • Chalk

      • Lint roller

  • I prepared a binder for my interviews and I found it to be extremely useful to have as a resource when I couldn’t remember everything in my brain

    • Things that I had in the binder for every interview

    • Specific things

      • List of courses I could teach at the school

      • One page for each one-on-one that I had, with a picture of the person, a quick description of their research interests, and a few bullets of things to talk about/questions to ask.  I left room to take notes on the page

 

The Research Talk

  • Reach out to host to find out details & expectations (for example, many suggest spending 40ish min on past work and 10ish on future work)

  • Typical structure

    •  ~10% a well-motivated problem

    • ~60% results (accessible to any professor in the department)

    • <=20% depth (the experts)

    • ~10% future

  • Memorize first and last slide

  • Be ready for the projector and connectors to all be broken.  Bring your own connector(s) and presenter clickers.  Also bring paper printout of slides to use as a reference in case you end up having to do a whiteboard talk (and markers/chalk)

 

Chalk Talk

If you are asked to do a chalk talk it’s important to find out what that means for the university, as the definition changes quite a bit.  Below are some examples of what it could mean and how to prepare

  • Vision Talk

    • I found this to be the most nerve-racking part of the interview.  If you have time, doing a mock vision talk with friends might be a good idea.

    • This can mean a full second talk with slides, a quick introduction with or without slides followed by discussion, or a completely open-ended discussion

    • DO NOT get overly technical (unless someone is explicitly asking you technical details).  The point of this talk is to communicate your vision in a way that is accessible to professors in the department, not just within your specific field.  From talking to friends, this seems to be the part that people most often mess up.

    • Think of this as an in-depth Q&A after your job talk. You can get asked details about your job talk, details on your first project(s) and funding sources, and about your long-term vision

    • It’s also useful to spend some time here making connections to the department/university. It would be nice for people to feel like you and your research would fit well and be an asset to what is already established

    • Note that there may be people who skipped your job talk and you may have to repeat yourself a lot

  • Lecture

    • I had one interview that required giving a lecture on any topic of my choice to senior undergraduates and graduate students.  It may be worth spending some time before you apply thinking about what topic you could give a lecture on if need be.  If you’ve lectured for a course before, consider reusing parts of that

    • I would err a bit on the side of choosing a simpler topic.  It’s better for everyone to understand you and think you’re going too slow than for you to try to wow them with some fancy math that leaves them all confused.  In my talk I introduced the concept of a linear program and epigraphs (from optimization), and even that was a bit on the complicated side.

  • Teaching Talk

    • I had one interview that involved a teaching talk, which could be either a lecture or a talk about my teaching experience.  I chose the latter since I had a fair amount of experience being a TA and I also wanted to spend time talking about my mentorship experiences

One-on-ones

  • Bring paper printout of your slides that you can use as a handy reference during one-on-ones. 

  • Have a research pitch prepped (and test it out on people first!).  What you say here will determine what the conversation is about.  Some phone interviews ask for a short talk or a few slides to guide conversation

  • Be aware of various groups / institutes at each university (e.g., most schools have a transportation institute of sorts)

  • Being exposed to the types of questions you may get asked ahead of time can help you prepare mentally and emotionally (see below). Note that this is a compilation of all the toughest questions I got plus ones that others told me they had, so it covers a lot. Many of your one-on-one interview questions will likely be a lot simpler than most of these (e.g. “Tell me about your research!” or “What would you like to know about the department?”)

    I also wrote down some potential questions you may want to ask your interviewers on different aspects of the department/university. If possible, default to asking questions that are more personalized and/or based on discussing your research and possible connections. But if you’ve run out of things to talk about and/or your brain is fried, it doesn’t hurt to have these questions printed out so you can use them. People just think it makes you look prepared ;-)

    If you have the chance, ask people to give you a mock interview. This is especially useful if you can ask a professor who is slightly outside of your field to give you a mock interview.

Questions You May be Asked

General

  • I didn’t get to see your talk, can you summarize your work for me?

    • Have both the 1-minute and 10-minute pitches ready

  • What do you plan to do next?

Current Research

  • What are you working on, what is your contribution?

  • Tell us about one of your recently published papers.

  • What project(s)/paper(s) are you most proud of?

  • What is the key contribution of your research?

  • How do you compare your research to <insert name of famous person in your field>?

  • Of the projects you're working on now, what would you take with you and continue to work on?

  • What recent paper do you wish you had written?

Next Research (near-term)

  • who are your competitions? Why are you better than them? how are you different from your advisor?

  • Where do you see your research going in five years?  

  • What are the titles and topics of your first five PhD theses?

  • What other applications are you thinking about?

  • Who would you collaborate with here?

  • What interdisciplinary collaborations do you foresee?

  • If I give you 1 million dollars right now, what would you work on?

Next Research (long-term)

  • Where will you be publishing in 10 years?

  • What are you going to be famous for in 10 years? 

Teaching

  • What could you teach?

    • Undergrad courses, grad courses, and special topics (usually based on your research)

    • What course would you teach to attract students to your lab?

  • Have you looked at our curriculum? What would you teach? What would you change?

  • What book would you use? Which chapters would you teach?

    • note: I only heard of one person getting asked this one time. I don’t think it’s considered a normal thing to have prepared

  • How will you balance research and teaching?

  • What is your teaching philosophy?

  • What would you change if you were to teach a course on <subject in your area>?

Mentoring

  • What is your mentorship style?

  • What technical background would you like your students to have? 

    • Be prepared to talk about courtesy appointments.

  • What is your advising philosophy?

  • What size is your ideal group?

  • Tell us about a time that you had a challenge with a student you were mentoring and what came of it

  • How will you onboard new students?

Facilities & Funding

  • Who will fund your research?

    • How will you connect with industry, especially if the university is not in a big city?

  • Have you written grants before?

  • Have you collaborated with industry?

  • How many square feet do you need for your lab? (apparently 500-1000 square feet is normal)

  • What does your dream lab look like?

  • What sort of equipment would you put in your lab?

    • Would you build it yourself or buy equipment?

  • Would you be sharing equipment or no?

    •  If you want equipment that could be used across departments that will be nice because draws from CoE funds and not departmental funds

School-Specific

  • Why do you belong in a(n) <insert department here> department?

  • Why do you want to come to our school?

  • What do you think about the city that our school is in?

  • Who would you collaborate with in our department?

  • How are you different from person X in our department?

  • Why do you belong in our department? (if applying to not your home department)

  • Which area of the department do you belong in (e.g., control, robotics, signal processing, etc)? 

Diversity

  • How will your presence enhance diversity in the faculty?

  • How will you support underrepresented students and increase the diversity of the department?

Random

  • Are you going to be a builder? (I have no idea what this question means)

  • Why can’t your research be done in industry? Why do you think robotics should be done in academia instead of industry or big research labs?

  • If you could bring one person from any university with you, who would it be?

    • don't say an advisor or someone too similar to you!

  • If you were to work on something totally different, what would it be?

  • How do you balance theory and practice?

  • If you went back to the start of your PhD, would you work on the same problem, or something different?

Student Interview

  • What is your teaching experience?

  • What is your mentoring experience?

  • How would you improve the diversity/inclusion of the student body?

  • How would you make a welcoming lab environment?

  • Tell us about a time when someone you mentored was struggling with something, and how you handled it

  • How are you going to help bringing something new to the department?

  • Would you go to social events with grad students?

  • What would you ask as a prelim/quals question?

Potential Questions To Ask Interviewers

Department

  • Is your department growing? What directions do you think the department should be growing in?

  • what do you value in your department?

  • How is faculty mentoring in your department? Can I get mentoring support for grant writing, what to teach or how to teach?

  • How much is the teaching load?

Research

  • How do you see collaboration inside the department and between departments? Do professors go for big grants together?

  • What are the shared equipment in the department? What about across departments?

  • How easy is it to work with students and faculty across different departments?

Student population

  • What is the ratio of PhD to MS?  How are both populations going to grow/adapt over time?

  • How is student recruitment done? 

  • How many applicants do you get every year? is it all from CS or EE or ME or Aero?

  • Where do your graduate students end up?

  • how do you pick a good student? how do you know a student will be good? how would you recruit a good student?

  • how is your undergrad program supporting research in this area? how can i help?

General questions

  • What relationships does the department/college have with local industry and government labs/agencies?

  • What are some criteria you’d look for if you’d want to choose a school as a junior faculty now?

  • what is one thing you wish you knew when you started?

  • what was the biggest shock when you first started as a junior faculty? 

  • If I have time over the summer, what should I work on? grants, prepare for teaching, etc?

Questions to ask during student interview

  • how many of you work in the same lab you started in? Do people switch labs ever?

  • can you easily take classes across departments/colleges?

  • do you ever work with students in different labs?

  • what is missing from the department?

  • what would you like a new professor do to help that missing thing?

  • what sort of advisors do you like?

  • what was the most important reason you chose to work with your advisor?

  • what do you like or not like about different advising styles?

  • do you publish in journals or conferences?

  • besides your own advisor do you work with other people?

The Offer

Below is the offer process as I understand it, as well as a discussion on the exploding offer issue.

The Offer Process

  • Usually the search committee first decides who they like best (and that could possibly be more than one person). You may or may not be contacted at this point (For example, I had one search chair contact me asking if there was anything he should know about my start-up request before he presented my case to the department. It was pretty clear that he was indirectly asking me if I had a two-body problem, but I didn’t discuss that with him. I had a different search chair at another university later in the process contact me to let me know that I might get an offer soon just in case I was on the verge of accepting an offer elsewhere.)

  • The search committee presents their decision to the department faculty and makes the case for why you should be hired

  • The faculty vote (it seems like there is often a requirement to make voting available for a few days after the meeting)

  • If the faculty vote “yes,” the department chair contacts you via email or phone to let you know that they would like to extend an offer to you

  • Second visits and negotiations happen over the next few weeks

  • If/when you agree to the terms of the offer, then the “official” offer is sent to you. Note that this isn’t usually sent until they’re sure that you are going to accept.

Defusing the Exploding Offer

Sometimes universities will make an offer very early with a short deadline. This is in an attempt to get you to commit to going to that university before you finish interviews and are perhaps tempted by other offers. Most faculty I talked to think that this is a dishonorable thing to do, but I’ve seen it happen to multiple people (including myself).

There doesn’t seem to be harm in asking for an extension, in that I have heard of no case where asking for an extension resulted in the university pulling the offer. If you definitely don’t want to work at this university, then it may not be worth asking. However, if you are strongly considering this place, communicate that to the department and tell them that you are still waiting on other universities. I found that if I had important-sounding universities that I was waiting on, the department chair tended to be more accommodating since they knew I would probably turn down their offer if push came to shove. I was able to move an offer deadline back multiple times by asking like this.

If you are told no to an extension, then start contacting any universities that you are still waiting on (and are seriously considering) ASAP to see if they would like interview you and/or speed up the decision process before the deadline.

Second Visit (after receiving offer)

I did not get to do second visits due to COVID-19, so I don’t have much to say here besides the questions I was told to ask (below).

Questions to ask

  • Vision for department

  • How are young faculty mentored

  • How much do students cost?

  • Can I have a semester off of teaching?  Can I do that during my second semester?

    • Often you’re not that busy in the first semester because you’re still recruiting students and waiting for lab equipment to show up.  So having the second semester off of teaching may actually be better

Negotiations

I largely focused my negotiations on my two-body situation. We wanted to make sure that whenever one of us got an offer, we pushed for the other to get an interview at the same university. Below is other advice I was given, though I didn’t need to use it because I had a decent start-up package:

  • Everyone wants you to succeed. So if the start-up offer doesn’t contain what you need to succeed, you can and should point this out

  • I did not do this, but in order to be specific about what you need many people send departments a spreadsheet that quotes things like:

    • Student computers, displays

    • High-performance computing needs

    • Experimental equipment (e.g. motion capture system, robots, sensors, parts)

    • A few student-years (4ish is normal to ask for in my field)

    • Summer salary (4-6 months is normal to ask for in my field)

    • Travel for domestic/international conferences for yourself

    • Travel for domestic/international conferences for your students

    • Society memberships

    • Misc. lab expenses (a few thousand dollars)

    • Space renovation (if necessary)

    • Lab office equipment (projector, printer, furniture)

  • If possible, ask people in your area for their spreadsheets (or in general advice on what to ask for in negotiations).

  • NOTE: You are not going to be held to this list! Most people end up buying pretty different equipment than they initially estimated. The goal of the spreadsheet is to get a rough plan of what types of stuff you’ll need and approximate costs. Once you actually start no one is going to be cross-referencing your purchases with this spreadsheet

To Postdoc or not to Postdoc

Apply straight from PhD or as a postdoc?

  • If you are coming from a lower-ranked school, it’s likely a good idea to do a postdoc at one of the top schools so you have that on your CV when you apply (which is a silly thing to need but unfortunately seems to matter)

  • If you’re coming from a highly-ranked school, there is a lot of conflicting advice on whether or not to do a postdoc before applying. It may be worth paying attention to current trends in hiring at universities (i.e. if this will be a “good year” for applying in your area). Also some universities/departments have a preference for hiring postdocs, whereas other prefer hiring people straight out of PhD programs. So it might be worth investigating this as well.

  • It’s probably not a good idea to switch to a postdoc right before applying (e.g. the summer or fall right before you apply). You’ll be listed as a postdoc so people will expect you to have already done cool postdoc research and will be confused. 

Deciding on deferring to do a postdoc once you have an offer

  • Pretty much everyone who has done a postdoc is grateful they did it, but everyone who hasn’t done one doesn’t think it’s necessary.  So it’s really a personal choice. I did not do one, largely because the COVID scare was starting and my advisor suggested that I start my job ASAP before COVID could make the offer vanish. In retrospect I don’t think it would’ve hurt for me to defer to do a postdoc, as I’ve never heard of someone having their offer revoked after signing and deferring for a postdoc.

  • Pros:

    • Some universities only count papers that are not with your PhD advisor towards tenure.  So if you start as a professor immediately and are still finishing up papers with your advisor, those papers might not count towards tenure.  So it might be preferable to finish those papers up as a postdoc so you can start fresh when you begin as a professor.

    • If you have an offer and are deferring for a year to do a postdoc, you can consider getting a “visiting scientist position” at the school where you will be a faculty.  This allows you to start writing small NSF proposals before you’re even officially a faculty member

    • You can go through the PhD recruitment process during your postdoc year, which means you’ll have PhD students who start at the same time as you. If you start the faculty job right away, you won’t have PhD students for the first year.

    • If you do a postdoc in industry, you can make a decent chunk of money before starting

  • Cons:

    • Delays being able to start building a life. As someone who wanted children pretty much immediately, settling into one place as early as possible was appealing to me.

    • If you’re in a really competitive research area that is very “hot” right now, it might be useful to start as soon as possible.

    • Delays promotion (and raises!) by a year since you start a year later

Other Resources