What I learned from this thread
1. A tailored cover letter is a cost-less signal that should be ignored...
2. It is too much of a hassle (cost) for applicants to tailor every cover letter...
Tailor Your Cover Letters
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False. I’m the OP and a tenured professor. I will add an important distinction- I’m not at an R1. Maybe at R1s all you need to see is how many pubs someone has and where they went to school, but for the rest of us, we dig a little deeper.
I'm guessing you are a grad student with a thin CV and uncertain about the quality of your letters (like most grad students). But sorry, letters matter, because senior people are best positioned to gauge the quality of a young scholar's contribution and potential for long-term contribution. Letters can also be highly misleading, but generally they are more informative than what a candidate tells you in their cover letter. The CV trumps all though, in part because many people involved in the decision-making process will only read your CV.
Every reference letter: "This is one of my best graduate students. They have a very promising career in political science."
I wish we could drop references altogether and focus more on why the applicant thinks he/she would be a good fit for our department. I'm pretty sure the only committee members who read reference letters are deadwood who gush over famous names.
Honestly, how much information does a cover letter communicate that you can't glean from a CV?
Not much. For many people CV and references are all they read. -
Well what I've learned from this thread is that way more people think cover letters are important than I do. I have sat on many search committees (Public R1) and almost never read the cover letters. My advice, as some people do seem to think it's important, would be to be as attractive as possible to as broad an audience as possible and I suppose do some slight degree of tailoring. This is not because it is inherently important, but because some search committee members expect to see it (for whatever ridiculous reason).
I never read cover letters. Truth be told, I don’t even read CVs until we have a long list. Sometimes I’ll give them to my wife to sort out. Being a woman, she enjoys sitting in judgment on random strangers far more than I do.
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Does every letter really say this is the best polisci student ever?
Tenured R2 full prof here. I have read lots of letters over the years. I always look at them, of course, but they don’t do much for me. 95% of the time they say “Larry is a very promising grad of our department. His research on (whatever) is novel and important. He will be a great political scientist.” Very, very few letters stand out. I have seen a few that are “he’s one of the very best we’ve ever had” and a couple that were unusually faint praise. Otherwise, the letters just don’t vary and are consequently of limited utility.
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False. I’m the OP and a tenured professor. I will add an important distinction- I’m not at an R1. Maybe at R1s all you need to see is how many pubs someone has and where they went to school, but for the rest of us, we dig a little deeper..
So at my R2, here’s how I initially look at applications:
1. Are they qualified? Are they really a theory person tying to pass themselves off as a policy person? (or similar). We’re, say, looking for a comparativist in Latin America; is the applicant really an IR person who knows nothing about Latin Am.
2. Will they be a good R2 fit? We are not an R1, we have a 3/3 load. But you gotta publish 4+ pieces in “real” outlets (we’re not picky about prestige) to get tenure here. Is the applicant looking for an R1 where he/doesn’t have to care about teaching much and interested in publishing a lot in top venues? If so, we probably won’t consider them. Does the person have enough research pipeline (and is it mainstream enough) to get 4 pieces in print? If they’re “settling” for an R2, we don’t want them. If they have a weak research record we don’t want them. I look for the Goldilocks candidates: not too hot, it too cold.
3. Do they have IofR teaching experience (it’s a must)? Can they teach a diverse array of courses? I like people who can fill many teaching slots. Teaching outside of their research agenda is fine. But if we are hiring, say, a judicial politics person, if they could teach Congress/presidency/a policy course, that would be a bonus. And ability to teach quant methods and/or online teaching experience is a REAL bonus. -
4. Is the candidate a lawsuit/pain-in-the-neck/primadonna? I *will* google the name and institution and look for news/reports/info of past problems. I have found all sorts of stuff: allegations of harassment, people who have sued their university over minor things, other improprieties. I will also look up reviews on ratemyprofessor.com and see what people have said about the person.
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If you don't put in the 5 minutes to write 3 sentences about our program, it doesn't look like you even bothered to do any research about a place you might work for the rest of your life. Committee members don't appreciate being sent a form letter in which you managed to only take the time to change out the name of the university to which you are applying. However, do expect a form letter from us for the rejection. Thank you, next.
Pricks like you make me very happy I left the profession.
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My experience on SCs at directional and low ranked R1, plus getting flyouts to SLAC/LACs indicate:
Tailoring is:
S/LAC>Directional/R2>R1
Remember, S/LACs aren't judging you by research, they are looking for teaching chops and collegiality in a department of 3-5 people.
They need to know you can teach the Intros, the specifics for the job, and maybe some more, as well as the weird interdisciplinary and immersion courses.
Go to their website and add the courses you can teach, the area studies programs you can cross list courses with, etc., in your letter.
R1s look for publications and that you aren't a Title IX waiting to happen. You need some teaching stuff, but they don't care.
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Let's play a counterfactual game.
Pretend that you are an honest-to-goodness sh*t-hot market star (which we know that not a single person here happens to be). Top 10 program, four solo top-3 pubs, sky's the limit.
Would you tailor your cover letters for different positions at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton?
Of course you would. No question about it. And the people in those departments would expect you to do so. If you didn't, they wouldn't give you a second look; if you sent a letter to Princeton talking about how you're just dying to work with Melani Cammett, your name would be laughed at in department meetings there forever.
So there's your answer about whether you, from a second-tier or third-tier program, with you two PRQs and one LSQ all co-authored with your advisor members of your cohort, should double-check to see if your cover letter is telling the people at Georgia Tech how interested you are in working at Oklahoma.
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I tailored the tails out of my current letter for my first/current job (small religious LAC). Given how closely the dept members work here with one another, and with students, I know a well-tailored cover letter was a necessary (but obviously not sufficient) condition for being hired. Of course, the whole purpose of the well-tailored cover letter was to demonstrate that I am a good fit for the institution. The hiring committee cared more about learning that than about, say, seeing that I had taken the time to tailor the letter.
Can't speak to the importance of doing so for an R1 or whatever. But I also can't speak to the experience of applying to hundreds of positions for which I'm ill-fitted.
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Does every letter really say this is the best polisci student ever?
Tenured R2 full prof here. I have read lots of letters over the years. I always look at them, of course, but they don’t do much for me. 95% of the time they say “Larry is a very promising grad of our department. His research on (whatever) is novel and important. He will be a great political scientist.” Very, very few letters stand out. I have seen a few that are “he’s one of the very best we’ve ever had” and a couple that were unusually faint praise. Otherwise, the letters just don’t vary and are consequently of limited utility.You don’t even know what the rest of us are talking about. Keep that in mind. Your reading comprehension is so low that you think we are talking about reference letters.
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Let's play a counterfactual game.
Pretend that you are an honest-to-goodness sh*t-hot market star (which we know that not a single person here happens to be). Top 10 program, four solo top-3 pubs, sky's the limit.
Would you tailor your cover letters for different positions at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton?
Of course you would. No question about it. And the people in those departments would expect you to do so. If you didn't, they wouldn't give you a second look; if you sent a letter to Princeton talking about how you're just dying to work with Melani Cammett, your name would be laughed at in department meetings there forever.
So there's your answer about whether you, from a second-tier or third-tier program, with you two PRQs and one LSQ all co-authored with your advisor members of your cohort, should double-check to see if your cover letter is telling the people at Georgia Tech how interested you are in working at Oklahoma.Your initial comment is wrong. Broockman posted here all the time. He was a hotshot.
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The general consensus emerging here is that tailoring may be less important for R1 applications and more important for R2 and LAC applications?
I’m at a lower-ranked R1 (think around 50ish). CV is obviously most important, but I always check out the first and last paragraph of the cover letter, looking for tailored info. One of the things that we worry about is bringing someone out, making an offer, and then getting turned down. We aren’t a top department, so that happens with some frequency. Knowing you have some reason to want to be here helps.
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The general consensus emerging here is that tailoring may be less important for R1 applications and more important for R2 and LAC applications?
Yes but a more nuanced reading is this: top 50 (or so) R1 are where almost all of you are getting your PhDs, but it's where only a small proportion of you will get your jobs. There is overlap between the professional norms and institutional culture of top R1s, but there is also quite a bit of difference at lower R1s, more difference at R2s, and even more at LACs and community colleges.
You need to be sensitive to the degree you can to those differences. The cover letter discussion is part of this. But really if you want to maximize your chances of getting a job at, say, a teaching oriented R2 or LAC, you should probably have a whole different packet for those schools, with a prominent and carefully written teaching statement, a different cover letter, even a different CV.
This doesn't mean specific letters for each school, but understand that the needs of these institutions are very different, and leading with what might be a pretty narrowly focused research project isn't necessarily the best way to pitch yourself.
YMMV.
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I've been on >10 hiring committees at two different schools. If you are looking at a SLAC, tailor your letters. If your CV is interesting, we look at your letter to get a feel for fit and your understanding of what we are looking for. People above say this is hypocritical, since we may well send you a two-sentence rejection letter. We do that because the university lawyer tells us to do that. Moreover, your cost of tailoring a letter is 15 minutes or so of work once you've applied to several places. My cost of bringing you to campus is a thousand dollars, two days of my time, and some risk of losing the line if we don't bring in people who are a good fit. If you won't take the time to explain why you are a good fit--and it is about more than publications and a list of courses you have taught--we won't bother with you. Remember, we have way more applicants to deal with than we have phone/skype interview slots.