Job Search and Career Related¶
- Under Construction: The current version is maintained by Song Huang. The material here is still highly incomplete and is likely to show personal bias. Any help or suggestion on improving this document, especially the general advice part, will be highly appreciated.
Can I haz a job? General Career Advice¶
- Getting an acedemic job is never easy, but at least you can prepare these things:
- Choose Your Own Adventure: Developing A Values-Oriented Framework
for Your Career by Lucianne
Walkowicz
- I think you should read this, every word of it, before you read anything else. This is probably the best career advice I have ever read. I worked on my mission statement right after I read this.
- FindingAda website has a nice poster: What kind of technologist
could I
be?
- “The poster aims to explode the idea that the only people who work in tech are programmers, and that traditionally female-coded roles, such as Teacher, Communicator and Facilitator are ‘not really tech jobs’.”
- “The role descriptions are left intentionally general so that students can more easily explore the nuances of different jobs within each catgory.”
- Many of these roles also apply to researchers or person with an academic background.
- Brown University’s CareerLAB has a few nice guidance for finding job inside and outside academia:
- Astrobites also have some nice career inside and outside astronomy (use Career Navigation as keyword):
- AstroBetter has a pretty nice series of career profiles (not
complete):
- Astronomer to Defense Researcher
- Astronomer to Data Visualization Specialist and Adjunct Associate Professor
- Astronomer to Chief of the Nautical Almanac Office at the US Naval Observatory
- Astronomer to Associate Director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute
- Astronomer to University Administrator in a Center for Teaching & Learning
- Astronomer to Senior Editor for Nature
- Astronomer to President of a Defense Industry Company
- Astronomer to Image Processor for STScI
- Astronomer to Financial Analyst
- Astronomer to Full Professor of Physics at a Small Liberal Arts College
- Astronomer to Head of Bioinformatics
- Astronomer to Data Scientist
- Astronomer to Tenure Track Faculty at a California Community College
- Astronomer to Tenure Track Faculty at a Teaching-Focused Institution
- Astronomer to Faculty and Entrepreneur
- Astronomer to Senior Staff Scientist in Industry
- Astronomer to Data Scientist at Fidelity Investments
- Astronomer to Director for the Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics
Stay in Academia¶
- Pathways to Success - A Holistic Approach to Professional
Development from Cornell
University
- The name sounds like a cliché, but some of the advice here is pretty good.
- Advice from a Faculty Hiring Committee Chair
- Advice for Aspiring Astrophysicists by Katie Mack
- Post-doc / fellowship applications tips
- ASA Early Career Researcher Mentoring Workshop – Getting a Job Note
by Bryan Gaensler & Sarah
Maddison
- These are some very good tips.
Searching for Astronomy Related Jobs¶
- AAS Job Register
- Probably the most important website if you want to find a post-doc or faculty job.
- Astrophysics Jobs Rumor Mil
- For faculty and staff
- For postdoc and term job
- Make sure that you don’t spend too much time here during the job season.
Resources and Tools for Job Application¶
To Apply for an Academic Position¶
CV (Resume) and Publication List¶
- Guide to use resumes and CVs from Cornell University
- You can make a CV using whatever software you want (e.g. Word, Pages), but LaTeX makes very nice and professional looking CV.
- There are a good selection of LaTeX CV templates on Overleaf. Some of these are a little too fancy for acedemic, but they all look pretty good.
Personal Website¶
- It is actually pretty important to have a visible personal website that links your CV and contact information. Make sure that it can be found by search engine.
- This is especially important if you try to find job in another country (e.g. get a PhD in China, want a post-doc job in Europe) or when you know the hiring committee is not familiar with you.
- GitHub Pages is pretty good choice to make a nice-looking personal website. And there are some easy-to-use templates available, and there are more fancy ones available
- Good examples (personal choice: clean and informative)
- Adrian Price-Whelan; the code can be found here
- Dan Foreman-Mackey; the code can be found here
Recommendation Letters¶
- Help wanted
Research Plan and/or Research Proposal¶
Teaching Statement¶
To Apply a Non-Academic Position¶
– Help Wanted