The academic job market is tough, and applying for jobs at lots of different universities can be a nightmare as you navigate different application systems and expectations. In this blog I’m going to outline a few key aspects that might help you in applying for the Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Nuclear Arms Control and Disarmament that we’re currently advertising at the University of Glasgow.
You can find out the details, the job spec, and the criteria here. The deadline to apply is 21st September.
There are two core components to most academic job applications in the UK: your cover letter and your academic CV. If you want to be hired, or even just make it to the shortlist, you need to ensure that these two documents shine bright, as your hiring committee is under pressure to read them and make decisions about shortlisting and who to invite to interview very quickly.
Let’s start with your cover letter. What I’m looking for here is a two page cover letter that outlines exactly how/why you meet the essential and desired criteria. A good cover letter tells an evidence based story that you are the right person for the job. It should show how you meet the requirements in the job ad in terms of relevant knowledge, skills, and experience. A good cover letter can be structured around the essential and desired criteria in the order that they appear on the job ad.
The shortlisting panel will be reading *a lot* of applications, so don’t bury information – make it super clear that you meet the criteria, and you can use the language of the job ad here, e.g: “I have specialist knowledge in the areas of nuclear weapons, arms control, and disarmament because I have done X which resulted in Y and Z”…
It can also be a good idea to demonstrate towards the end of the cover letter what will you bring to the job, the project team, and what you would ideally like to do on the job (…within the remits of what the job ad says is expected of you, but maybe think about what paper you might like to write, what impact you would like to deliver and with who, for example).
Now, your CV. An academic CV needs to once again show the hiring panel that you’re the right person for the job in terms of the essential and desired criteria. Key things to include are your PhD (topic, dates of award), any publications published, under review or draft publications, research/teaching experience, public engagement/impact, service (e.g were you a PhD student representative, peer reviewer for a paper etc?), research interests and startegy, and if you’ve obtained any prizes or grants at this stage of your career then put them on there too (near the top ideally!).
The right time
The first essential criteria I’m looking for is a PhD. If you don’t have a PhD yet it is probably not worth applying – unless you have submitted your thesis and are scheduled to have your viva before the start date of the job. Feel free to drop me an email if you have questions about this.
The right fit
So what exactly am I looking for? The job ad shows that I’m looking for someone to work with me on the broad remit of studying and hoping to improve contemporary nuclear arms control and disarmament efforts, so you should have expertise or at least a strong interest in working on this for the next 2.5 years of your life.
The successful candidate will lead on work packages of my UKRI funded Future Leaders Fellowship that are centred around interviewing and doing focus groups with nuclear arms control and disarmament advocates and stakeholders, as well as public engagement and impact with relevant people, states, civil society and the public.
You will need to be a team player and happy to be working with me as the fellowship raps up; so you’ll also need to be a keen writer and effective at publishing co-authored works that build upon the work we’ve done on the project to date. If you have any data-science skills then that’s also a plus.
You will also need to be keen to move to Glasgow. The team and I are Glasgow based and we use the facilities at the University of Glasgow on a pretty much daily basis as our best ways of working involve regular team meetings and co-working face to face (we also eat a lot of pizza and drink a lot of coffee together, and thats more fun IRL than on zoom). If, however, you think you are the dream candidate but would need to work hybrid for specific reasons then let me know (though for visa purposes you would have to be living in the UK and it will not be possible for anyone outside of the Uk to do this job remotely/hybrid).
I’m also aware that you might be interested in applying but either haven’t done your PhD on the topics of nuclear arms control and disarmament, or even nuclear politics in general. Instead, you might be moving into the field, and if this is the case then you need to outline explicitly in your cover letter what you will bring to this field of study and how you fit with the job.
I have a passion for working interdisciplinary with people from different fields, so don’t feel that because you don’t exactly do critical nuclear studies in the way that I do you won’t be considered. I’m not looking for a clone, but a colleague and collaborator.
So, for example, you could have done loads of interviews with policy elites ona. completely different topic so you have amazing methods experience, or you have a solid grounding in feminist theory and can illuminate how gender matters in nuclear disarmament, or you are a data science pro that could up scale our work in a really novel way, or you’re a nuclear scientist who can really dive into the technical intricacies of disarmament verification and irreversibility, or you’re an expert in peace studies and how effective negotiations and sustainable justice can be delivered, etc etc… Then please do apply for the job, just make it clear what you your unique expertise will bring to the team and to the topic of nuclear disarmament.
Do hiring committees dream of AI applications?
Finally, we need to talk about AI… It might seem like a fast way to write your job application, but I promise you that you are better at writing your own application than ChatGPT is!
I’ve seen AI used in recent applications for PhDs, our fellows scheme, and the last post-doc I advertised. In all of these, the applications that used or were heavily reliant on AI stood out… in a bad way.
Because generative AI is essentially a probability based writing machine, if you rely on it for your application, then your application is highly likely to look the same as someone else who also used AI. I’ve also seen AI applications write things that are overlong, over and weirdly written, structured oddly, and I’ve seen what looked like good applications be ruled out because they included hallucinated references to papers that don’t exist.
I think many people have also now got a pretty good read of what marks AI writing out, and whilst most places have AI policies that don’t explicitly rule out using AI in applications, my advice is that you should not rely on it to generate content in your job application.
Maybe AI could help you restructure things or whatever, but if you make it the shortlisting stage AI is unlikely to help you when you have to talk about yourself face to face with the interview panel.
So, if you are applying for this post-doc, then put the robot down and write your application from the heart – I want to hear about you, from you, not from some hallucinating, probability based, billionaire owned, fancy sounding but shallow slop machine!
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