Practical Job Market Tips - Things that your advisors don’t tell you

I’ve put together some useful tips on the job market to save some time searching, which may not be related to your research. My overarching theme is that you should automate the process as much as possible to spend less time on making cosmetic changes but more on actual research.

Getting Started

Building your own website

Build it today, especially if your first & last names are common!!!

• Common platforms
  • Google Sites: easy to build (and check where the users access your website from), fewer ways to customize
  • Github: easy to customize and upload your package, time-consuming to properly build
• Contents
  • Required: brief description of you, contact information, your CV, research papers
  • Optional: teaching (as instructor and/or TA), your availability on this job market, personal interests
• Uploading your file
  • GitHub: Highly recommended. You’ll need to sign up if you don’t have one yet. The main advantage of using GitHub is that the URL to your file is stable; you don’t need to recreate the URL to your JMP every time you update it. To create the URL, refer to the links below.
  • Key idea: update the file without changing the file name.
• Backburner stuff
  • UT Marks
• Useful links:
  • Kevin H. Wilson, So you want to build an academic website?

Formatting your JMP (LaTeX)

Don’t reinvent the wheel… You have better use of your time!!

• Template
  • You need style file (.sty), main latex file (.tex), and bibliography style file (.bst). The two style files keep your main latex file clean and focused on the contents. Don’t ever manually change the format in the main tex file unless you really have to.
  • Pascal Michaillat has really cool and parsimonious LaTeX template for research papers. It’s also easy to customize as you go.
• Fonts
  • Several font styles are more suitable for digital prints, but you can experiment. NEVER use the default LaTeX font.
  • 12 point for text and tables, 11 point for footnotes (Goldin & Katz)
• Figures
  • Highly recommend to use eps file (.eps) instead of png file due to better resolution in the pdf format. eps files allow you to scale an image up or down without losing quality. The only downside is that sometimes the figure size can be huge. Use png format when showing a map, network, and so on.
  • If you are using Stata, use different schemes to change the overall appearance of your graphs. Asjad Naqvi wrote a clean scheme called schemepack, which I found very helpful in visualizing my results. You can even go further and create creating your own scheme using grstyle.
  • Useful links
    • Color advice for cartography
    • Color palettes for Stata graphics
    • How to add texts in Stata graphs
  • Python also has
• File size
  • Some schools limit the file size below 5mb (one school asked to limit to 3mb..!). As long as you don’t draw a map of US school districts in the eps file, you should be fine. If not, consider converting it to the png format.

Writing XYZ statements

ChatGPT does a great job of writing the first draft for you. Make some changes so that the statement reads as if you wrote it.

• Teaching
  • UT
• Research

Near the Market

Finding job postings

Keeping track of applications

One code to rule them all..!

• Keep spreadsheet
• Write a code to manage applications

  Managing your letters

  Trust the money, not you

###

Backburner stuff

• Professional picture: photoshop statistically insignificantly
• Good looking: Nice suit & shoes, haircut, shaving, trimming eyebrows
• Get good teaching rating
• Buy nice webcam and microphone (and green screen?!)