This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, We share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. So if you're enjoying writing it, we'd sure appreciate it if you took a moment to rate and review us. Thanks so much. Today we're speaking with Jeffrey Kopsting, who is a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns among minority groups and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society. So we're speaking about some of the writing or some of the written components of a job application. 
These would be the cover letter, the writing sample, and the teaching statement or philosophy that we sometimes submit. I remember one of my own advisors, I think I was telling you about this, Jeff, but I remembered one of my advisors telling me, that a cover letter for a job needs to sing. And that always felt like a good goal. And it kind of inspired me to try to include my own distinctive voice and also to try not to write in a boring way and to actually try to say something interesting in a letter that does need to convey some key information. So I'm curious, what advice do you give your students and colleagues about that job cover letter? Thanks for having me on, Rachel. 
And it's... It's a kind of a hugely important question for people who have either finished or are just about to finish their PhD because they've never applied for jobs before. And I think you're right that that initial cover letter, especially that first paragraph on that cover letter, has to draw people in. I think the best way to think about this is I've been on many search committees, right? And you get, I don't know what it is in other disciplines, but in political science, in any given job out there, you'll get 100 applications. If you don't get 100 applications, it's not a general enough search. So you're sitting with at least 100, sometimes 200 applications in front of you. And of course, your eyes glaze over after a while. 
And the question is, you know, which ones stand out? And what makes them stand out is that first paragraph. And I think you're completely right. I mean, of course, making it sing is a subjective view. I mean, you say, okay, so how do I do that? How do I make it sing? And of course, finding your own voice. I mean, some people spend their whole lives as writers trying to find their own voice. And I still, I mean, I'm 61 years old and I still think that I'm imitating my favorite professors. But over time, you know, you do develop your own way of thinking. And the best way of thinking about that is to try to state it really simply, right? Don't try to be highfalutin. 
Don't try to sound smart, if you will. And that first paragraph has to say, you know, first of all, you have to state the most, there is a boring thing you have to say at the first sentence. I am applying for your job, as advertised in, right, and sometimes even the job now. And then you have to say something about why this is a great fit, right? Because they're hiring you. When an academic hires, I mean, the stakes are high, because in most places, they're making a decision about what it's gonna be, who they're gonna, as their colleague for the next 30 years, maybe even longer. And, you know, you've got to sit in meetings with these people, you've got to, you know, and, you know, read their work, evaluate their work, value their opinion. 
And so that first paragraph is super important because it sort of sets the tone. Do you, I'm curious if you can think back to, and I don't know how much detail you feel you can reveal, but what kinds of opening paragraphs sort of stood out to you or what the writers seemed to be doing that worked, that made you kind of perk up or feel something about this applicant? Well, I mean, I've always been at research universities, right? You know, big research universities. And so the emphasis always with the applicants is, is their research interesting? Is this the kind of thing where I think they're going to make a big contribution to the corpus of knowledge? in my field. Now, teaching is important too, right? 
And if there's nothing wrong, I sometimes think that I should have taken a job at a teaching college because I really enjoy it so much. I wouldn't be under such pressure all the time to write great books and articles. And so let's start with the research first, right? And I think really what you have to say, look, this is what I'm interested in. And I think this is a really important important problem, and others do. It's central to the field. So you know, in political science, there are big questions of why are some places dictatorships and others democracies, for example. And so that first sentence might be, if you're working on that, my graduate training, my graduate work, and my dissertation really focus on what I think is a key question in all of politics for the last 2,000 years is why are some countries 
rule differently than others, right? And there it's simple. Who's going to disagree that that matters, right? And so, you know, that's political science, right? You know, in your field, Rachel, right? And I know your work pretty well, at least when we first met, right? And, you know, some of those questions, you know, what are the conditions under which a minority or an immigrant in the United States group in the United States can start to feel like they're in the club, in the group. How does that actually work? And so if you state it in that way, a really kind of general level, that even someone who doesn't care about politics and dictatorship and democracy or the fate of Jews in the United States in the 1930s and 40s and how they became, quote unquote, Americans, even somebody who's not interested in that particular question can still be interested. 
in what you're doing in general, because it will speak to them, to them, right? And those are always, you have to remember that you're writing for an audience. You're not writing for yourself. And you're not even writing for your committee, because that's the big transition is to make, say, when you're writing a PhD, you say, look, I have to get it by these three people who have to sign off on this. The thing with getting a job is you're making the next step, right? The next step is to say, can I make what I am doing of interest to anyone else. And the reason that first paragraph is so important, my mom was a television writer. And so she used to tell me that when you're in a pitch meeting, you have 30 seconds, right? 
And then you're swimming with crocodiles. The trap door opens up underneath you and you're finished, right? And so it's really important not to lose your audience, to hook your eyes in that first thing. Now, of course, we're professors, right? We're academics. Nobody expects it to be you know, a pitch for a television show. But it should be written in a snappy enough way with an active voice, good verbs, and so that other people will find it compelling. Now, that simply sounds another way of singing, I realize, of making it sing. But each field has kind of core questions. And if you're a graduate student, you're probably latching onto something that you think is important. You gotta tell them why it's important. Not in a kind of obloviating, arrogant way where you're puffing yourself up. 
You say, look, this is a consensus. Other people think this. I think it's really important. I was always attracted to that, to those sets of questions, because I thought they were important too. And here's why I think you should think it's important also. That's great advice. Thinking about, you know, finding one of the key or core questions in your field and also thinking about how your work can be described in those more human terms that, as you were saying, kind of anyone can relate to. Right. And that's a way of also saying, look, this is a really important question. And I'm not the only one who thinks this is important, right? You know, other people who you probably know use search committee, right? 
You know, and you probably know. It's not even bad. You could mention, right, if it's so important, right? You know, if it's like, you know, since Played Up, you know? Since Plato, we've always worried about regime type, right? Or Aristotle, right? The Greeks worried about that, right? So I'm just using this as a running example. And there's nothing wrong with doing it. It shows you're educated. It shows this is kind of a timeless question that's not going to go away. Even after you finish your dissertation, what you've worked on, the core thing that attracted you to this is going to retain importance and relevance. And that feeds into, are you going to stay a productive scholar later on? Are you on to a kind of a fruitful and generative line of thinking? 
And will your students, that's why, will your students find you a windbag or interesting, right? And if you can make them think it's any better, you know, even if it's a teaching position, right? And I don't mean to say that in any kind of pejorative way, right? But in some places, like my first job was at Dartmouth, and there they really cared about teaching a lot. They cared about research, but they really cared about teaching a lot. And there you say, are you going to be the kind of person that students are always going to be interested in, even after you finish your dissertation, even after you publish your book? Or is that it? Have you filled in a gap? If you say I'm filling in a gap in the literature, don't do that. 
Don't say that. Right. Because that's the most boring way of putting I'm actually dealing with a crucial unresolved question. Right. And that's that's the voice. I think you should, you know, the space that you should occupy, the kind of voice you should use. How do you get at that continued relevance issue that you mentioned? Does that come up in the describing your second project or upcoming project? Yeah, I thought about that before we were talking today. I knew you raised that question. So you have that first paragraph where you're going to say, look, I want to say something else about that first paragraph. You should say, my research and teaching interests make me a really great fit for this job. Now, you don't have to use exactly those words, but it should imply that in that first paragraph. 
I'm a really good fit for this position. You don't want your application to be put in the wrong pile. You want it in the good pile, not the bad pile, because you haven't ticked the box. Say that in an interesting way. This is my research interest. You're going to get to return to what that is when you actually talk about the details of your dissertation, which comes next if you're an assistant professor. But both the teaching and the research, we're then going to move in the letter. I'm just going to give you an ideal letter. It's going to then have, after that first paragraph where you talk about, in general terms, why you're such a good fit and why your research and teaching interests make you a good fit for this position, then in that second paragraph, 
you're going to then move to a more detailed discussion of your, if you're an assistant professor, your dissertation or your first book project, right? And there, you know, that's something that should be easy. You should be pretty good at that because you're going to have to come up with a famous elevator pitch, right? Anyway, that is when some big professor in your field, you meet that person at a convention and you're in an elevator and they say, oh, what are you working on? you have to be able to answer that question there's the the pitch meeting to the to the production uh team at nbc right you have to be able to say, I'm working on this really important question, and here it is, and i think i have an interesting take on that um and so that second paragraph you're going to talk about, you know, in my dissertation, or in my book manuscript, right? 
I do this. It is a a study of you know, in your case, gentleman's agreement, right? That's the film, right? Which won the Academy Award, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you're going to say, I'm going to do that. And here's what I do, right? And don't say in chapter one, in chapter two, no, don't do it that way, right? Say, here's what I do. In terms of continuing, like, will you remain a kind of a productive scholar over the long run? Once you've gotten through that first phase paragraph and say, you know, I anticipate having a, you know, I think I'll have a book and five articles out of this, right? And that will kind of position me well in the field, which will then provide a great launching platform or whatever to my second project, which I've already started to think about because, and here's the thing, because it related to my first project in a way that didn't quite fit 
I found some interesting archives or new materials, or there was a side question that emerged from that, and the reason it's good to show it growing out of that is to show that you have a coherent intellectual agenda. That you're not scattered, you're not saying, thank goodness when I finish with this boring project I can move on to something else. Because that's the implication if you go in a totally different, there's nothing wrong with changing directions completely, but that should probably happen a little later in your career. Because people are hiring you and they want to see, look, who is Rachel? Who is Jeff? What is this person? What are they interested in? And so that second project should build on the first, ideally, in some way. 
Or it can depart from it. It doesn't have to be the same thing, but it should be intellectually connected to it. And so that's the kind of second short paragraph out of that. I've only started to read the archives or the materials or the novels or whatever. or that I've designed the survey, or if you're a social scientist, or whatever, but I haven't, you know, I'm not gonna send you anything on it. You're telling them that, you're not gonna send it, because it is a second project. No one expects you, at least at the assistant professor stage, to have had that. What's interesting, if you're an associate professor and you're applying for a job, then you say, in my first project, I did X. Now, I am doing Y, right? 
And it built on that, And here I have a couple of articles and soon there will be a book, right? That's what the letter should imply. Does that make some sense? Yeah, it completely does. It also makes me think back to, I guess, early job applications I did when I didn't have the book contract yet. And I felt like I should, that I was at a stage where that should have been something I could include. Is that, I mean, I guess if you don't mention it, it's, it's clear you don't have the contract yet. Should you, should you mention the book stuff later or is, you know, what should you do with that omission? If you have a book contract, you can say my project, which was based on my dissertation and now under contract with X university press, right. 
You know, you know, so that, that kind of solves that. If you haven't done it, said, you know, you can say, you know, I anticipate having, you know, I think I need another three months. before the book's ready to be sent out, I plan on sending it out to major university presses. That can be in that same paragraph. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, that works well. And I guess I also want to ask you about the difference in the tone in the cover letters for this early stage, maybe grad student who's applying to jobs and an associate level graduate. If there's a danger in veering into something that might sound like arrogance or when you're writing it, I remember that was a concern, but I never really knew how it came off to be saying these great things about yourself in a letter. 
It's so true. I mean, not to toot your horn too much, right? And also, of course, the tendency in these letters is to really say, here is me at the center of the universe and everything kind of rotates around me. Right. And so you don't wanna say that. But if you think about it, when you're hiring at the assistant professor, an assistant professor hires, especially if there's not a lot of record there yet. You're hiring on potential. It's pure potential. Especially if you're at an institution which has kind of tenure standards where they deny people tenure. And because then, if it's really hard to get tenure, then in fact the stakes are lower for the hiring committee. It's famously at Yale. Remember, they give nobody tenure, right? 
Or hardly anybody, or at least they used to not give anybody tenure. Actually, the stakes are quite low. You're hired there, it wasn't expected you'd get it, and then you'd use that as a jumping-off point to get your next job, right? And you'd end up somewhere else, okay. But if it's at that kind of a level university where they expect to tenure from the inside, the stakes are quite high. So once you've, you know, I'd say... You know, this issue of humility versus tooting your own horn, you know, that really depends on the personality. I think that, you know, if you just state it in a matter-of-fact way, don't evaluate your project. That's what I would say. Don't say, you know, this is a compelling and original take on. 
That's for the reviewer of the book to say. That's not for you to say. But you say, this book addresses a really important thing. No one's going to question your evaluation of this question being important, but you should not then say, you know, it's original. You can say, for example, if you have an archive that nobody has ever used, right? You can say, look, nobody's, I think I'm the first, you know, I'm the first person to have used this archive, and I believe this offers a new take, a new insight into this. Or if it's based on an original data set that you've compiled yourself, then you can say that. There's nothing wrong with saying, but just try to avoid the evaluative superlative, because that does sound, that's a bit much. 
The big difference, I think, and I was thinking a lot about before we talked about the difference between an assistant professor application and an associate, especially a full professor application. And the big difference, and we can talk about it, the cover letter should look different, right? Because I've applied for jobs as assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors. When I came here to the University of California at Irvine, I was, you know, it's a full professor letter. And I think the big difference is in what they're looking for. When they're getting an associate, or especially a full professor, they're getting a highly established scholar already, right? They're getting someone like that already. And really, they have to be looking for They're looking for different things, and especially what they're going to be looking for is leadership. 
When you enter a job as an associate or a full professor, you're entering a position in which, because universities are sort of run by, departments are run by full professors, and universities are especially run by full professors. And so when they're hiring you, they're going to expect you not simply to kind of go sit in your office, close your door full time, and never have anything to do with institutional leadership. On the contrary, I think you have to show that you're willing to take your turn at a minimum, even if you're not entering as a chair or a center director or a dean, that you're willing to take a turn, that you've enjoyed this. And so, therefore, that first paragraph should say something like, if you're a full professor or even an associate professor, here's what I've done for the last 15, 20 years. 
I've spent the last 15, 20 years, right? researching, teaching, and building institutions based on, designed to further our knowledge and teaching mission and regarding, you know, film studies or Russian politics or whatever, right? And the letters got to then correspond to that changed expectation. If you write an assistant professor cover letter for a full professor job, I don't think you're going to get hired. Unless All they want is your amazing research, right? And that's just not the case, right? The reason you think about it, why are we hiring a full professor? You're hiring a full professor because your department has decided it wants simply not only to have an established scholar, but to have some intellectual and institutional leadership. What's more, especially at big public universities, it helps to talk about the grants you've received. 
or the money you've raised, or the institution building you've already done. That goes into the third section of the letter. We still haven't talked about the second section of the letter, and that's your teaching. And that's very important. So the first one was about your research and your intellectual direction. The second section of the letter should move on to your teaching, which grows out of your intellectual interests. However, I mean, is it okay if we move in that direction? Oh, yeah, yeah. Most, again, I've taught at big research universities, and at big research universities, we have, you know, there is kind of, let's say, three kinds of classroom teaching, and then there's out-of-the-classroom teaching, right? There's the kind of lower-division introductory classes. It always helps to say that you like doing this, because universities have, departments have a terrible problem trying to fill those courses with 
with competent instructors. I haven't actually liked doing them. I think it's a kind of honor and a privilege to be able to shape the young minds of 17 and 18 year olds. I like to think, this is my own arrogance, I like to think that once they've been exposed, once they've heard my Karl Marx, for at least three weeks, they're all Marxists. Not that I'm trying to turn them into that, but I think that it's so compelling that they, and I'm not a Marxist, but they should read these great books and get attracted to them, right? That's the in. That's why you got into it. That's why I got into it. I mean, that's why they should get into it. So there's the lower division classes, the intro classes that get people involved in the major, especially, let's say, in the humanities where they have trouble getting people to major in humanities these days. 
You want to kind of cue them that you're the kind of person that's going to attract people into the major. Then there's the kind of upper division classes where the meat of your research can get either at the seminar or at the kind of lecture. And you should let them know that you like lecturing, but you're not a blogiator, and that you're very interested. And here's where I'm old. There's all this stuff about teaching technologies and flipped classrooms and all that stuff. I have to confess I'm not very good at that. I basically, I talk for 15 minutes, then I take some questions, then I talk for another 15 minutes, then I take some questions. I realize not all teaching's like that anymore. 
and that's up to the sharks of your generation to solve. And then while the courses that you, when you talk about the courses that you like to teach, you should talk very briefly about what the course might look like. And be prepared during a job interview to actually go into more detail on that, like the books you'd assign. But what should be the intellectual agenda for that intro level class, and then the upper division class, And then, of course, if you're at a research university, there's going to be graduate classes, right? A PhD class, right? And there it gets closer and closer as you get more and more from an intro level class to an upper division class to a graduate class. They grow more and more closer to your research. 
So that by the time Rachel Gordon goes in the PhD class, from the upper division class, it can be Jews in film, right? And then at the at the phd class, it would be something like, you know you know the ethnic cinema, or something like that, or minorities in cinema, or something like that, or the theoretical um the broader theoretical issues that you deal with would be kind of a phd level class so that's you know, as far as teaching goes, you should say you're sort of open to all of those things, right? You know, you don't want to be the kind of person who's difficult right you know that's as i've been a chair of a department That was, for me, the hardest thing as chair, getting people to go do their teaching. 
So, you know, I had to introduce a kind of a service course requirement, right? And they said, look, you have to be willing every single year to teach at least one service course, right? That you may not want to teach. So you should let the committee know you're not going to be that kind of person. You actually enjoy doing that kind of stuff. That will help get your foot in the door, which is what you want. And do you talk about assignments or creative ways you teach these service courses? Yeah. Yes. And I think that it would help if you're applying for a job at a university to look at how they teach, what they do. Some universities, like our university, have what are called writing course requirements, which are writing intensive, and you're given extra teaching assistantship to help you with that. 
And it might say, you know, to even to tip that you say, I see that you have this intensive three week intersessional seminar. It would really I would love to teach one of those. And that shows you've actually taken some interest in their mission, their vision and their mission, like how they actually do what they're supposed to do. Right. Or in my case of my university, I've seen these writing classes. Right. And it's such a challenge these days with chat GPT. Right. How do you actually have students write papers anymore? By the way, I have no good solution, Daniel. My solution is to get rid of papers and make them all write blue book exams. But that cuts out technology. But, you know, if you have a superior solution to that kind of problem, that's something that they're thinking about a lot. 
I know it must be that Florida must be thinking about the same thing. And so are we. So, you know, it can be in there. Remember, you only have now, you know, let's say this letter, this cover letter is two pages. I think two pages is a good single space. Well, 11 or 12 point time is fine. Don't get fancy. Don't get weird. Don't play with the paragraphs. We're professors. I can spot a millimeter change in paragraph after 30 years. So don't do that. Two pages. And so now we're in this teaching section. You don't have that much time or space. Now, if it's a teaching college, flip it and make that teaching, put it before the research. Mm-hmm. that signals that you're taking really seriously what they're doing. 
And if it's a research, if it's more an R1 type of situation or something like that, R1, you know, research university, put the research first. It's fine. They can blow from each other. You can tell. I applied to all kinds of jobs when I was, I think I applied to like 40 jobs when I was an assistant professor. You know, when I had like 40 pages of my dissertation finished, right? And, you know, that's what I did. I, I, I tailored the letters or I had two kinds of letters. Um, and that should, that's good. Then sometimes I would, you know, I would signal that I hadn't read their institutional materials. I applied for jobs before the internet. So it was, it was tricky. 
Um, but I did my best. I did my homework and that shows that you're taking it serious. Um, so. So after that teaching or research paragraph, um, what comes next for you? Okay. What comes next? If you're an assistant professor, what comes next is you need to signal that you're going to be a great colleague. And there are many ways of being a great colleague. One is to show that you read other colleagues' work. We don't think... I mean, our job as professors is sort of monastic. We write our books and articles in isolation, and we teach, we conceive of our courses by ourselves. But we don't only think alone. That's the thing. We read each other's work. And I really like reading other people's work. 
And I love it when people read mine. I abuse that privilege all the time. Or if you enjoy co-authoring, or if you enjoy co-authoring with graduate students, that's a big deal. Because that shows that you're committed to helping them get jobs. So I've done that sporadically over my career, sometimes intensively, other times less intensively. It's always helped them get jobs. That's a good thing. The other thing is applying for grants. Because when you apply, let's say, at the National Science Foundation, if you're in the social sciences, right, you apply for a $100,000 grant, the university gets $50,000 of that money as indirect cost recovery. You are contributing to the university budget. Deans and department chairs like you. So there's that. So reading other people's work, you know, 
Now, as an assistant professor, you're not going to be asked to be on too many committees. If you are, they're sort of abusing you, but you should signal your willingness, your eagerness to partake of collective governance of the department, of the university. As you're more senior, let's say you're applying. So when I was here, I was brought in as an outside chair. uh, to a department. And I showed in that portion of it. So I had the research and teaching sections were much shorter because I knew what they were looking for. They wanted somebody who was going to come in and make sure everybody played nicely together. Right here and here at the university and to signal that I was going to be. 
So then I told stories in that letter. Here's what I have already done. Right. I was, you know, um, I spent years helping to build the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. That involved both kind of relations with donors, relations with faculty members, with all kinds of different views, to constructing collaborative relations with departments, both in the humanities and the social sciences, and at law schools and business schools, people with different intellectual orientations and agendas. It shows you're kind of a team builder. And that goes in that section, in the kind of service section, which the more senior you are, that's going to be a larger section. And I think even, you know, for me, when I sit on committees and we're hiring associate and full professors, if they only talk about their research, I think this person's going to be a self-absorber jerk. 
Because please, I mean, after a time, it's hard to be a professor. We all know how it's hard to be a professor. You've got to show you're willing to pull your weight, right? Smarts, all of us are smart, right? That's a prerequisite at some level. Yes, you've accomplished. You've published in the top presses and journals in your field. That's sort of expected by the time you're at that level. And I'm very interested. They're going to come in and give a job talk. But let's face it, a full professor's job talk has a different status than an assistant professor's job talk. Same with the letters. The letters should reflect that, right? Anyway, is this sort of what you're looking for? Yeah, very much so. 
I mean, it reminds me what you were saying earlier, which I guess was kind of a surprise, but makes total sense to me, which is at that associate and full level talking about your role in the university governance and administratively, whatever. And associations. I left one thing out of the teaching that I totally forgot. If you're an associate or a full professor, you should talk about graduate students you've worked with. Because that's a big deal, right? Especially at our one universities are going to care a lot. So I really enjoyed, I co-authored with grad, that's where the kind of out of class. So co-authorship with graduate students can almost fall under the teaching category. You understand? Because let's face it, right? When you're working with graduate students, you're not only, it's hard to write an article. 
I do a literature review and I think about that. It's hard to do that, right? It's hard to set up a good study. And so you're teaching them as you're co-authoring with them. But to go back to what you just observed, then yeah, when you're more of a senior professor, you've got to show that you're committed to institution building. It doesn't have to be saying that you're going to be building a center or remaking the world or remaking the department. And it still involves a certain amount of modesty. I found this hard, but you can say that. At a certain point in your career, you've got to be able to say, I'm willing to let other people take credit for my hard work. 
And that's what the institution building part of it is. Everybody knows it's hard work, and everybody knows that you're building the intellectual environment that you're leading, but which everybody else is going to benefit from. You're creating a collective good through your own personal effort. And you have to signal that you're willing to do that. Yeah, I mean, I imagine for you, all that you did as head of the Center for Jewish Studies at Toronto, that was a huge Jewish Studies center, a lot of fundraising, and as you were saying, other collaborative work, that must have seemed very attractive. Yeah, and I mentioned in my cover letter about how much money I raised. Why not? If you say, look, if you're in the research section, if you say I received the $400,000 National Science Foundation grant, why can't you say in the 
That's in the research section. Why not in the service section? Would you not say how much money you raised, right? You know, university administrators will care about that a lot. You know, it shows that you're able to do that. And, you know, and you can even admit, you can say, look, in those three, four years I did that, you'll notice from my CV that the number of articles that came out went down. They won't mind. Nobody expects you to be a machine, right? And that's okay. And People know that, okay, you stop. I was director of the Secretary of Studies at the University of Toronto. Then I moved here and I was a chair. And then for the past, since before COVID, I haven't been chair. 
The output trajectory has gone up again. That's expected. That's normal. And that's good. That's sort of what I want. And it's hard to do that. It's hard to switch gears. Everybody knows it's hard to switch gears. And that's fine. Mm-hmm. There is there's something that I notice some of us sometimes do in these cover letters where we mention a couple people in the department that we'd like to join that we're looking forward to working with, maybe because we already have a relationship or we've looked up on the website and their work looks like it has some overlaps with ours. Is that a good move? Because then you're not mentioning other people. Seems like the flip side of that. Yeah, it's a hard question. 
I don't really have a great answer for it. The plus side is that if everybody loves that person that you mentioned and that person loves you, the person's going to say nice things about you. The problem is that if you mention that person, then that person has a harder time being your advocate in a weird way because they're seen as being already in your camp and they're not there. Maybe they know you already. Maybe, you know, who knows, right? So my inclination would be to mention, the intellectual, I'm really fond of the film studies strength within that department, or something like that. I can see myself having great conversations with the people there. The other problem is that if you mention somebody who everybody hates, or if the person who's famous doesn't get along with anybody under all circumstances, everybody will say, come on, she's not being sincere. 
She doesn't really know this person. No one will say anything at a meeting, but everyone will think that. It's like when graduate students apply for a program and they say, I want to work with this person who's been retired for five years. And not that there's anything wrong with retirement. I hope to do that soon myself. But the question is, is it sincere? Or is it something that you just found on the thing and it's something you put in there because somebody told you you're supposed to mention people? I think a more serious intellectual engagement, signaling more serious intellectual engagement, saying, I noticed that, you know, these three, four people, right, working in my field, it's great. I'd love to be part of the conversation. 
Yeah, that is. That's, I think, both safer and more, quite honestly, more authentic. Yeah, I think so, too. I wanted to ask you also about the writing sample when you're choosing what article or chapter to send. And what if, for instance, your best article is actually more than a few years old? What should we take into account in choosing a writing sample? In the social sciences, it's very common to have what's called the job market paper. And that's the paper that's your best piece of work, and that's the one you're gonna talk about in your job talk. It's like the standard in the social sciences. If somebody presents a job talk and it's not publishable, they're not hired. So in the social sciences, the answer to that is really easy. 
It should be your job market paper and if you have another article, if you have another published article. So that's an easy answer. So let's say you're allowed, I don't know what it is in the humanities. You can tell me what's the standard. I mean, you know, is it like 30 pages or something like that? Yeah, about that article length. Yeah. So, you know, if you have a published article, send that. If you have a paper, right, that's, you know, your best piece of work, send that. And I read those when I'm on a search committee. I read those because you can polish a cover letter over and over and over and over again until those two pages really, as you said, sink. 
But can you make 30 pages sink? No, nobody can really make 30 pages sink, especially at the front of their career. It's hard. But you read it and say, yeah, I can see commenting on this person's paper, or I can see this person giving my work to that person to read. and so it is important. A good search committee will narrow down those 100 applications to 25, 20, based on cover letters and the cds and then then they'll start reading really closely, right? And now they might not get through 25 30 page papers let's face it, right? But they're going to get through the first five pages of those papers, right? And that's good so you should you should definitely do that. Your other question, though, was what do you do, because that's 
obviously for a more senior professor, right? Or a person who's more experienced, been in it longer, an associate full professor. You know, if they're hiring at that level, I don't have a great answer to it. I'd say more recent work, more recent work. Because look, if they're hiring at that level and you're attracted to them, they know your older work already. They know the work that you published 10 years ago, five years ago, right? but if you've got something which has just come out or will soon come out, send that, because that shows where you're going. Nobody wants to hire somebody who's just going to show up and then retire, as it were, a full professor. He's going to show up, beautiful California, look at the beach, that's where you're going to go. 
You're going to grab your surfboard and go to the beach every day. You want to show that you've got many years of scholarly productivity and creativity in front of you. And so I think showing that you've got fresh and interesting ideas, it's always preferable, I think. Yeah, and I guess especially as you were saying for these full stage or maybe even associate to show that there's exciting things going on now. Yeah, so one of the things I always, so for example, I do a lot of letters for tenure evaluations, professor evaluations. And one of the things I always say, and I always have a little paragraph in there, about prospects for future scholarly productivity, creativity, whatever abstract noun you want to use. And I always assess that. 
And I assess that. I like getting unpublished papers, right? Although, as an assistant professor, that's tricky. But I like getting stuff that's sort of fresh because that tells me, does this person have gas in the tank? Or are they finished, right? There's nothing wrong with being finished, right? Nothing, right? But, you know, it depends. You're usually not, that's not the thing that's going to get you the short list. Yeah. Something you didn't mention so far, and I didn't either, is the teaching statement or philosophy, which is one of those documents that might not always be asked for. Some people I know stick it in a job application anyway, and we can imagine that for teaching colleges, this is more vital. Right. But it seems like another place where you get to show something of your distinctive style and voice and obviously what makes you special in the classroom. 
I don't know if this is something that has come up for you as you're looking at prospective colleagues. Do you think it gets read? What does it mean to you? It's interesting because when I first was on the job market, it was 30 years ago, a long time ago, they didn't have those. It was all in the cover letter the cover letter was everything. That was included. In some ways, of course, the teaching statement is an elaboration. It's an elaboration. But I think there's nothing wrong. So I'll give you an example, right? There's nothing wrong in a teaching state i've used this before in teaching things we have to, whenever we go up for a little, we have little mini promotions at the university of California. 
Every three years they they evaluate us. And you have to submit these teaching, research, service, and diversity statements. You have to put all these statements, And I'm up this year again, so I just wrote these things again. And so what I put in my, one of the things I put in my teaching statement is, and here I'll confess, I'm a much more comfortable lecturer than I am in a seminar, and it's weird. I find seminars really stressful. Now, I say that, most professors tilt their head, they don't get it. Wouldn't you rather be in a seminar with 12 people talking about a great book? But I find it very stressful because in a seminar, if conducted correctly, you're sort of not in control, right? 
That it's the students. I mean, the logic of the seminar is learning through discovery, right? That they read it, they talk, they then react to each other. And what if they react and they start, you know, one person says something that I would consider to be a bad idea. And another person says, oh yeah, what a good idea. And then they respond to the bad idea. At first, you know, you've infected the entire class with bad ideas. How do I control that? It makes me so nervous. And so I'll confess in that teaching statement, to the types of things where I've had to work in order to reach a level of comfort. It's like the symposium, right? You know, I've played at a symposium or a Seder, right? 
You know, it's sort of like that. And you're sitting around and the temptation is to then hijack the discussion yourself and say, okay, here's what this book is really about, right? And if you do that, you've lost immediately, right? You're not doing what you should be doing, right? You're not guiding them. You're not this... How do you sustain this logic of discovery without hijacking the discussion yourself? And there's nothing wrong with saying that in a teaching statement. That shows you've thought about it, right? And a level of kind of sincerity and honesty. And you should say how enthusiastic you are, because let's face it, good undergraduate teaching is like 80% enthusiasm. If you're bored, they're going to be bored. And you should really convey, 
And you can even say, like you can go back to when you first got enthusiastic about something, when you were first turned on intellectually by your professors or instructors, right? And what was the logic there? Why were you? And you'd like to replicate that. And of course teaching, I think for the first 10 years of teaching, I was sort of imitating my favorite professor. And then eventually you find your own voice. By adding little bits, little bits. And then eventually what does happen is your own, you can't remember anymore what those professors were actually like and said, it's all you. Or it's you plus an amalgam of all the faculty meetings and departmental and associational meetings you've ever gone to. And that becomes you after all those years. 
But nobody expects a 27-year-old to actually have that yet. Yeah. Related to this whole application submission that we've been talking about is the question of just reaching out maybe to someone in the department before or during, whether it's someone you know or have met at a conference. Is this a good thing or does it appear actually improper if you're asking sort of for more information about the position or if something seems unclear to you about the application? the job posting, do those interactions do anything? I don't think you should contact people in the department. I think, again, it sabotages the process and it opens up the possibility that someone will say, you know, it should be open. Now, your advisor, that's a different question, right? 
And that can be, I think, a good advisor will really go to bat for you, not simply in generating a strong letter. You've got to make sure those letters are strong. And, you know, I don't know how, but those letters are strong. So nothing can sink a colleague fast enough, faster, sink a job candidate faster than something, you know, some line in the letter saying, I think after a few years, this person will achieve great maturity or something like that. You mean they're not mature? So you want to make sure that the letters, your own letters are strong, but I think contacting people there, if they contact you, then that's a different story, encouraging you to apply. But contacting people there, I don't know. 
There's a slight it factor there. I think it will work on me. Unless someone, because if someone said, should I apply? I'll always say yes. Always. Because I want to increase the size of the pool. I want the pool to be as large and competitive as possible. I would say, yes, please. I would be enthusiastic about everybody applying. Right. My answer to that, should I apply, will in no way be encoded. I think you'll get the job. It will never be encoded. It would be completely unethical and unrealistic because let's face it, jobs are a job search. They're subject to all kinds of wins. You go there, you make it through the letter, people read the work, you get invited in for a job talk, the 
committee needs and then the department needs who knows what goes on in all of those things the kind of the potential say one group likes candidate one another group likes candidate three so they settle on candidate two that is everybody's third choice right it's kind of crazy that way so yeah well thank you so much, Jeff. This has been really helpful. I so appreciate your you're taking time to talk to us today. It's a great pleasure, and it's great to see you and thanks for inviting me on. Yeah, my pleasure. And a shout out to our producer, Alex Lowy, who had this great idea for doing something on the job application process. We appreciate, Jeff, your helping us out with that. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. 
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