Writing a cover letter for a community college teaching position is a slightly different task than writing a standard cover letter. While you should definitely use the language in the job advertisement when you describe your skills in the cover letter (and avoid addressing the letter to To Whom It May Concern at all costs), you can also include teaching evaluations and comments by students:
Demonstrate you’ve got the chops — Part I. Let your readers hear your students’ voices or see their reactions to your work. This can be done in a variety of ways: by quoting particular passages from student evaluations or by including single-page summaries of numerical evaluations and comments in an appendix (avoid sending scores of pages). If you’ve been nominated for or won a teaching award, talk about it as modestly and tastefully as you can.
For a teaching position at a community college, you can let the cover letter run more than one page, but I wouldn’t go more than two pages.
It can be awkward when one friend is employed and another isn’t:
For younger employed adults, that could mean no longer discussing new apartments, comparing salaries or asking the standby question “So, how’s the job going?” If you’re in your 30s or 40s, a topic not to bring up may include your luxurious summer-vacation plans. Fifties and 60s? Investments, property and retirement are first on the list of dinner-party taboos. These days, money talk has climbed to the top of social no-nos. “You don’t want to rub your good fortune in a friend’s face,” says Peter Post, a director at the Emily Post Institute for etiquette. “So you should temper enthusiasm for your own personal well-being.”
I find that last part (”temper enthusiasm for your own personal well-being”) good advice for any time. That’s not to say you can’t celebrate, but perhaps you should cancel the fireworks and grandstanding announcing your celebration.
And now we move on to the second in a series of questions about required and requested materials to cover letters.
A cover letter (as a hard copy or an email) generally is written in standard business letter format with these sorts of paragraphs:
1. Date (this can be left off in an email)
2. Your contact information (address, email, phone)
3. Contact person and contact information for the company (Yes, you should try your best to find the specific contact person even if it’s not listed in the job advertisement—try the website)
4. A greeting to a specific person (Dear Mr. Dellafave:)
5. A sentence that states what job you are applying for and how you found it (e.g., I am applying for your job as head bean counter advertised in the Los Angeles Times on 4/13/09)
6. A paragraph that summarizes your qualifications in terms of the job description. (e.g., I am an experienced bean counter. Briefly my skills include: bullet point with job skill; bullet point with job skill; bullet point with job skill; and bullet point with job skill.) This is the biggest paragraph and the most important one. This should clearly show how you have the skills they need.
7. A closing that suggests how much you would like to meet with this person
This should all fit on one page or in a short email.
Some folks say they don’t read cover letters, and they might not. However, Ms. Theologian has had much more luck with cover letters that mimic the language in the job advertisement in the list of bulleted skills thereby passing through Human Resources quickly and landing her resume on the desk of someone who might hire her. She has also had luck by customizing the summary paragraph of her resume to include items from this list of bulleted skills.
Any other thoughts on cover letters, readers?
-Ms. Theologian
P.S. To write to Ms. Theologian, send an email to ms dot theologian at gmail dot com.
Dear Ms. Theologian,
My apologies if you’ve covered this before, but my questions concern cover letters and writing samples.
How long should they be? What are some do’s and don’t to be aware of?
And while I’m thinking about it, what about requested writing samples? Should they be specifically tailored for the job to which you are applying, or should they be generally representative of your best work, regardless of topic or content?
-Applying for a Job
Dear Applying:
Let’s take the writing sample question first, which seems easiest.
You should choose from your portfolio or create from scratch a writing sample that is similar to the type of writing that the job expects in terms of content, format, and length. Did I just hear you groan? Ms. Theologian feels your pain.
Several years ago, Ms. Theologian was in the position of evaluating writing samples for writing positions. You would be surprised at the variety of samples people sent. Most of them were completely inappropriate. What does Ms. Theologian mean by that? They weren’t similar in any way to the type of writing required in the job, and it was difficult to see if the writer had the abilities to do the work. You want the person reviewing your sample to say, “Wow, here’s someone who has experience with this sort of writing and does it well,” and not, “What the hell is this?” Ms. Theologian said, “What the hell…” quite a bit in that job.
Funny story. In th same job, Ms. Theologian had a colleague who was responsible for evaluating graphic design samples, and he had exactly the same problem. Graphic designers submitted everything and anything, including some nice naked people for a job designing children’s books, which gave everyone a laugh. They were nice naked people as naked people go, but particularly inappropriate.
Ms. Theologian wishes you well with your samples.
-Ms. Theologian
P.S. If you’d like to write to Ms. Theologian, send an email to ms dot theologian at gmail dot com.
A few years ago, I showed up at an interview expecting to see two people (I asked on the phone who I would be meeting with), and was instead faced a marathon interview with five separate people. Each interview lasted 30-45 minutes, and at the end, I collapsed in my car thirsty and exhausted.
I didn’t get the job, and I attribute that partly to the marathon interview gone bad. I also didn’t want the job: the interview revealed that the position essentially was managed (poorly) by five people, which seemed a recipe for unhappiness.
Here’s some advice for dealing with the marathon interview. In short? Don’t worry about repeating yourself occasionally. It shows consistency. Arrive at least a few minutes early (no more than ten, say the professionals). Bring multiple copies of your resume. And have solid work-related examples with your success stories.
This has been a slow news week. Yet it has been a strangely eventful week for me at work. Military-like coups, vengeful mutterings, and all sorts of intrigue. I think I may survive, but only because it’s entertaining to watch.
Meanwhile–this week in the weird workplace:
The funniest part of this story to me was “she wasn’t receptive to the idea of seeing her colleague in the buff.” I’m trying to think of a situation where that sentence WOULDN’T be true. Maybe… nah, not even Johnny Depp. Well… okay maybe then.
Meanwhile, this poor mail carrier was beaten up by a woman after he refused to open her neighbor’s mailbox for her so she could look for a check she was expecting. Usually it’s just dogs they have to look out for.
Here’s another one that cracks me up. I can just envision the look on this guy’s face when he realized he’d robbed a cop. At a police convention. “This should make all Pennsylvania news as the dumbest criminal in Pennsylvania.”Why do I picture the part of the cop being played by Dennis Franz?
Not funny but horrifying, a coach beat one of his students with a canoe paddle, and then when it broke, he repaired it with duct tape so he could continue beating him. “Paddling” may be legal in Texas but I’m not quite sure this is what they had in mind.
And finally: Ooops. “After a brief second of shock, laughter and howls erupted from the 23 advanced-placement students, mostly freshmen and sophomores.” Oh my god that would have been the best day of school ever back in my day.
Alrighty folks, hang in there. Try not to become a headline.
How early do you arrive for a job interview?
Five minutes? Ten minutes? Fifteen minutes?
For interview, don’t arrive too early explores just how early you should arrive for an interview. The comments are particularly interesting, full of interviewers and interviewees with strong opinions on just how early “early” is.
In some cities, Los Angeles, for example, it’s hard to arrive on-time anywhere, so you always run the risk of being some place very early or very late. A coffee shop or bar (just kidding on the latter) can serve as a place to organize your thoughts before the interview. But the general consensus is not to arrive more than ten minutes early, unless there is paperwork to be filled out. Granted, you’re not always told that.
If you’d like to comment on how early you’d arrive for an interview, please leave us a comment.
Oh, how I wish I were not intimately familiar with a breast pump!
A few weeks ago, The Atlantic published The Case Against Breastfeeding, an article by Hanna Rosin. Possibly nothing has brought me greater joy in the past six months than reading that article. Rosin doesn’t suggest breastfeeding is bad, but she does suggest that the sacrifices that have to be made along the way can be extreme and that the evidence in favor of breastfeeding is substantially less overwhelmingly positive than you might think (and have been told over and over). Furthermore, and ultimately, it seems to me, breastfeeding in the U.S. is an issue about class. Some women have time and space to pump at work or have paid time off to nurse or earn enough to save money to pay for their own time off—these women are more likely to be in white-collar jobs. Read the rest of this entry…
I haven’t blogged in a while about work, mostly because everywhere I turn there is another depressing article about work and the economy, so I’ll respond to a few posts about Unitarian Universalism and Sunday school attendance (hey, it’s still work).
Here are some thought-provoking reflections from a post titled Busy Families:
My goal this year was to help our families realize that “our religion isn’t taught, it’s caught” and that to really have children absorb all the good stuff about being Unitarian Universalist, families have to show up on Sundays. The dark part is that even when they really get that, life still pulls hard, and most of them come less than half the time. Maybe it’s our substandard programming, but I really don’t think so–our programming really is excellent. Maybe it’s the nasty building we meet in, could be. I know it’s not the teachers, they are dedicated, top quality, dear folks who commit for a whole year to the kids. I really think it’s just the pace of life.
and reflective questions from a post titled Have you ‘caught’ UUism:
So, what is it about our denomination and our lack of committment to stay in the game and go the long haul? Why do we so easily give it up? What does that say about us as a group and us as parents that we forgoe this so easily? I guess I am wondering why it isn’t important enough to commit to.
First, I should say that I find it hard enough to get people to commit to a dinner party, so committing to something every Sunday seems just about impossible.
Second, let’s not play the This Is Our Important Problem and No One Else’s. We like that game (everyone does). And I don’t think there is any research to indicate that sporadic attendance at Sunday school is a problem only for Unitarian Universalists. Hey, there’s freeware for maintaining Sunday School attendance records and books, such as Sunday School Attendance Boosters, and articles about Sunday School attendance (warning: author blames “working” women, but there’s a lot of intriguing data amid the sloppy argumentation) because everyone has this problem.
Third, I think there’s a paradigm shift necessary (one idea here) if we really want to boost church school attendance (or church attendance). What if the problem isn’t consistency in attendance of Sunday school? What if that’s the symptom of the larger problem? I would posit that the larger problem has to do with how we treat religious education and religious educators and children, which is to say we often treat religious education as if it’s something only for children, and then we put the programming in the windowless basement (literaly or metaphorically).
Possibly I will have more thoughts on this. Possibly not. Hard to say on a Saturday.