Tuesday, January 04, 2005

A word to the wise

If you are going to send an application for the opening at my fair institution:

  • You might want to include the name of the institution in your cover letter.

  • It's generally a good idea to spell the name of the institution correctly.

  • It's always a good idea to get the name of the department correct as well. Or, at the very least, have some idea of what field our department represents.


On a related note, I have discovered a new pet peeve: Cover letters containing footnotes.

2 comments:

~profgrrrrl~ said...

Footnotes? Oh, do tell. Please?

Jane said...

Too lazy to go back through the pile, but off the top of my head...
Some of them were citations (articles, grant numbers). These cover letters read like a mini-research statement.
Some of them referred the reader to the applicant's web site "for further information" (teaching portfolio, full text of papers, etc).
And some of them, bizarrely enough, were just parenthetical comments. I don't know if the writer thought s/he was being cute or what, but I was not amused.
I swear I am going to write a book when this is all over.