Writing a Vitae for the Job Market
I was just giving advice to my student Changmin Lee about going on the American academic job market. Some of the advice I’ll want to repeat, so I’ll put it here. If every foreign student takes this advice, it will help the market work a lot better. And it is a good illustration of how to apply game theory thinking to real-world situations.
1. On your curriculum vitae (resume), put somewhere “A recording of me speaking English is available at http:/www.iu.edu/jkjkjk.mp3, and a movie of me teaching is available at http:/www.iu.edu/jkjkjk.mov.”
You might want to omit the movie, but for a foreign student the recording is crucial. Think of it this way. For Korean students, the employer’s prior is that the job applicant can’t speak English well enough to be worth looking at seriously. You need to provide information to possibly change that belief.
Advisors’ letters are information, but extremely poor information, and unless your advisor can truthfully put you in the top 5% in terms of English-speaking ability, his letter won’t help. (If he lies, and you are only top 10%, not 5%, in English, then when the employer finds out, your advisor won’t be believed on anything else either and you’ll lose your research credibility.)
To be sure, your web recording will show that you have a heavy accent. But that won’t change your employer’s belief– that’s his prior anyway. Without the recording, you have zero chance of being interviewed in person; with the recording, you have a positive chance. The employer may decide, “Yes, he speaks English poorly, but he’s not as bad as I thought he might be, and it’s hard to find good applicants, so let’s try him out.”
You will have changed the employer’s belief in two ways. First, you may be able to increase the expected value of his belief as to your ability. Second, even if you actually reduce the expected value because you speak English poorly even for a Korean, you will still have reduced the variance of his belief. He will at least learn that you are not in the bottom 10%, and that may be enough for him to be willing to interview you.
2. Include your photo on your vitae, first page. That will help readers spot which is yours in a big pile and help them connect vitae to you around interview time.
3. Include the websites of your thesis committee, so employers who become seriously interested can check out members they haven’t heard of.
4. Do include the fact that you were invited to give papers at conferences, but don’t give that a lot of space. Don’t bother to include the titles of the papers, for instance.
“I have been invited to present papers at The Fourth Annual Corporate Reporting & Governance Conference/ The Sixth Annual SEC Financial Reporting Conference, Irvine, California (September 2007), The VII International Finance Conference, Monterrey, México (September (2007), and The International City Break Conference on Business and Economic Research, Athens, Greece (October 2007).”
5. Put the list of committee members on the first page, but don’t put the addresses till the last page. You need to save space on the first page for the titles of your thesis papers. Keep in mind that most readers will throw away your vitae before reading the second page.
It is okay to repeat information. You can have a long vitae with lots of junk on it, so long as the first page contains everything that really matters. Imagine your readers has having a stack of 200 vitaes and one hour in which to select the best 20.
6. If you have done lots of teaching, list it all but at the start give a summary such as “I have taught 5 sections as a principal instructor and 4 sections as a teaching assistant over the past 3 years.” Get that statement on the first page of the vitae.