Evolutionary ecology of host-parasite interactions

A while back I wrote a blog post (check it here) on how host adaptation to the predation environment could influence host-parasite coevolution. This happened to be my first blog post, and also my first chapter for my thesis. I specifically explored how guppy (Poecilia reticulata) adaptation to its ectoparasite, Gyrodactylus, can be influenced by their adaptation to predation. In that study, I found that both predation and Gyrodactylus parasitism induce similar phenotypic responses in guppies (i.e. reduction in growth and higher reproductive allocation), which led me to conclude that guppy adaptations to predation could reinforce adaptations to Gyrodactylus parasites, and vice versa. Another important point, which will be evident later in this blog post, is that there were also strong and repeated variations in guppy-Gyrodactylus dynamics across the different rivers, which was independent of predation – at the end of this series of blogs, you might come to realize I have a frustration with river effects!

Given the particular experimental design of my first study (for specifics check the published paper here), I was unable to disentangle the confounding effects between highly resistant hosts and highly virulent parasites, with those from low-resistant hosts and low-virulence parasites. This restricted any potential inferences on host-parasite adaptation. Thus, I decided to build on the previous experiment to assess local adaptation of guppies and Gyrodactylus, and to determine if such adaptation is influenced by the environment (i.e., predation) or evolutionary history (i.e., river).

The mesocosms where I performed the experiments.

In the so called arms race between parasites and their hosts, parasites have generally been expected to have an evolutionary advantage over their hosts due to short generation time and potentially high host specificity, and, thus, be locally adapted to their host. Yet this has been far –really far– from a universal rule. Studies on how additional sources of mortality could influence host-parasite local adaptation, and whether they prevent or facilitate host-parasite adaptation, are still largely missing– despite that they would help to better understand the mechanisms of local adaptation. For example, in the case of predation, we could expect that under increased guppy mortality (high-predation: HP), higher Gyrodactylus’ infectivity and transmission (i.e., virulence) would evolve, and this of course would in turn select for higher resistance in HP guppies. Thus, a priori, one would expect that local adaptation is facilitated in high-predation environments.

Of course, based on the results of my previous study –more on my fixation with river effects– differences between rivers could also be important drivers of guppy-Gyrodactylus local adaptation. This is because guppy populations from different rivers are genetically diverged, in part because they originated from independent colonization events, but also because different guppy evolutionary histories (i.e., selection, genetic bottlenecks and drift) could similarly influence guppy-Gyrodactylus coevolution in the various rivers in different ways. The predatory fauna in rivers from the northern and southern slopes is also drastically distinct: visual predators of the Cichlidae family are only present in the southern drainages, whereas the main predators in the northern drainages belong to the Eleotridae, a family of generalist ichthyophagous predators. Such differences in community composition could strongly influence the relative fitness costs associated with Gyrodactylus infections in the different rivers and, hence, guppy-Gyrodactylus local adaptation. If you are still wondering what I mean by guppy-Gyrodactylus local adaptation, I refer to locally adapted Gyrodactylus when they show higher performance when infecting their sympatric than with allopatric hosts, and locally adapted guppies when guppy performance is higher when infected with sympatric than with allopatric parasites.

 I will only briefly summarize the methods for this experiment, but if you are really eager to know more details you can check the published article here.

I used fully reciprocal cross infections with two guppy populations from the Marianne (one HP and one LP), and two from the Aripo river (one HP and one LP), and their corresponding sympatric Gyrodactylus ectoparasites. This design led to four sympatric pairs (hosts and parasites from the same locations) and 12 allopatric pairs (hosts and parasites from different locations) (Fig. 1).

Experimental design with Gyrodactylus infection dynamics.

We found that Gyrodactylus performance on their sympatric host was generally similar across populations (Fig. 2), but their performance when infecting allopatric guppies was dramatically different! In particular, Gyrodactylus from the Aripo performed the best (both as mean number of parasites/fish, as parasite population growth) when infecting guppies from the Marianne, but did poorly when infecting guppies from their own river.  This could indicate a higher infectivity, virulence and/or reproductive success of the Aripo parasites. Gyrodactylus from the Marianne, on the other hand, performed similarly on all hosts, or even slightly better when infecting their sympatric guppies.

Gyrodactylus performance on sympatric vs. allopatric hosts.

We found similar differences in guppy performance (Fig. 3). Aripo guppies were able to better limit Gyrodactylus population growth than guppies from the Marianne River, indicating their strong ‘‘resistance’’ to Gyrodactylus regardless of the source of the parasite. Surprisingly, predation environment had no detectable influence on host–parasite population dynamics of sympatric or allopatric combinations. The much stronger effect of river than predation emphasizes its importance in driving local co-evolutionary dynamics. Damn you, river effects!

Guppy performance when infected with sympatric vs. allopatric Gyrodactylus

At the end of the day, I think that this study demonstrates that, contrary to a priori expectations, Gyrodactylus coevolution is not deterministic, and could be influenced by historical demographic and evolutionary processes. This is an important aspect of host-parasite interactions that has been commonly neglected in studies of local adaptation, and this study demonstrates the need to incorporate them into future research on host-parasite coevolution.

The actual paper:

Pérez-Jvostov, F., Hendry, A. P., Fussmann, G. F. and Scott, M. E. 2015. Testing for host-parasite local adaptation: an experiment with Gyrodactylus ectoparasites and guppy hosts. Int J Parasitol, 45: 409-417.

How to Get a Faculty Position II

We are now in the midst of a series of three posts on “How to Get a Faculty Position”:

1. Getting the interview.

2. Succeeding in the interview

3. Guaranteeing success

In the present post, I will deal with point 2 – succeeding in the interview. Your CV has gotten you the interview but now an entirely different set of skills comes into play. My advice here will boil down to a couple of general points, each with several supporting arguments.  Although I expect my suggestions will hold in most instances, it is important to remember that jobs/departments/committees vary just as much as do individual people, and so you might need to adjust your strategy to suit the situation.

The key starting point is to realize that the department is not hiring your CV, they are hiring you. They have already determined that your CV is sufficient for you to be a member of their faculty; now they essentially throw out the CV and judge you based on your performance during the interview. As a result, someone who just squeaked in as the last person on the short list after a bunch of folks with more impressive CVs now has an almost equal chance of actually getting hired. In fact, people in such a position sometimes have an advantage because opinions depend on expectations. Someone with a huge CV comes with huge expectations during the interview and, if they don’t blow folks away, they can seem disappointing. By contrast, someone with only a decent CV can blow folks away with a good performance during the interview. So how to succeed during the interview? Unlike my previous post where most things were rather obvious, I will hopefully now have some novel and surprising things to say.

The hiring committee wants to see a colleague

Young scientists seeking their first faculty position can sometimes interact with professors as though they are still students. That is, they can be deferential rather than assertive, shy rather than bold, intimidated rather than confident, and so on. Acting in this manner can give a strong negative impression as it really does make you seem like a graduate student, which no committee is going to hire. Instead, the people you meet, whether the committee, other faculty members, or students, really want to envision you as though you are already a professor, which is the role they are hiring you for. So, how to do this without seeming arrogant or over-confident?

Talk. If you are too quiet, it will come off as though you aren’t engaging and sometimes as though you don’t have much going on upstairs. Your CV may have all sorts of outstanding papers that show you (or your supervisor) are really smart, and it may seem clear that you will publish lots of papers once hired; but the committee is not hiring your papers – they are hiring you. Being a member of a department is so much more than the papers you produce – it is also how you interact with colleagues, how you interact with students, how you collaborate, how you hang out, and so on. In fact, some faculty members who are very successful with publications nevertheless come to be viewed by their fellow faculty as bad hires because of their arrogance or indifference or disengagement or whatever. What the hiring committee and everyone else wants to see is a nice, engaging, and challenging EQUAL (at least in North America) during the interview. Of course, you also don’t want to talk too much. That is, don’t cut folks off when they are talking (unless you can’t get a word in otherwise) and don’t talk just to make noise (say something interesting). This can be very challenging and exhausting and, as I can attest from personal experience, can lead one to say things that come out wrong – a trap that I fell into during at least one interview. 

By Kerry Soper.

Prepare well but don’t look like you over-prepared. It is frequently suggested that folks going to an interview should know a lot about everyone’s research in the department, including having read some of their papers. This advice is certainly fine at face value BUT it can’t look like you have done this specifically for the interview. Instead, it should seem like you knew something about everyone’s research just as a matter of course in your normal research activities before getting the interview. Two elements of psychology come into play here. First, it can’t look like you are desperate for the job. If you are, then it will seem like you need the department more than it needs you, which is unlikely to inspire enthusiasm for your hiring. Instead, you want to make it seem like you are very interested but that you have other (implied) options that make you relaxed about whether or not you actually get the job. If this is done well, it can lead the committee subtly to the feeling that the department needs you more than the reverse, which makes you more desirable as a hire. Second, faculty members want to think that you knew about their work outside of the desire to get the job. That is, if you read their work only in preparation for the interview, then you didn’t really know about it otherwise. However, if you knew their work independent of the interview, then it makes you seem widely read and generally knowledgeable. Perhaps the best way to walk this tightrope is to explicitly refer to the person’s work only after they first mention it. You can facilitate this sequence by asking “So, what projects are you developing now?” Then, as they talk about their projects, you can interject a comment or two that makes it clear you know earlier aspects of their work. 

By Kerry Soper.

Engage in social activities. I have also seen it suggested that, when asked in an interview if you want do something (go for a beer, have a coffee, see a local attraction), you should just say yes! I generally agree with this point but with some additional nuances. Many faculty have other departmental members as their best friends and members of their social circle. Thus, they are often consciously or unconsciously hoping that you – the interviewee – will also become a friend beyond the necessary work interactions. They want to imagine you hanging out with them and engaging in sporting activities or clubs or poker nights or garage bands, or whatever. They want to envision a causal, relaxed friend as well as an intellectual colleague - and participating in social activities really helps. Many people who have not yet had a faculty position, think that faculty spend all their time talking about and debating science. While such debates are indeed frequent, much of the time faculty talk about other stuff (music, sports, politics, etc.), even at work; so it is great if you are comfortable doing  same. These informal “fun times” during an interview can be a great way to talk about your hobbies (hopefully following naturally from other aspects of the conversation), weigh in on a political issue, or refer to the latest social media scandal. These relaxed interactions will make you seem sociable, which will help people to see the sort of value-added colleague they would love to have.

Of course, you also don’t want to project yourself as someone you aren’t. Most obviously, you shouldn’t drink if you aren't comfortable with it. In addition, you should avoid situations that encourage inappropriate comments or discussions about race, religion, sex, or other topics that can be insulting or uncomfortable. Moreover, if you receive comments of this sort during the interview, you should make sure to tell the department chair or someone higher up. Situations that make you personally uncomfortable or intimated should not be tolerated or allowed to pass. 

Found here.

The presentation is critical

In addition to the above “I am already your colleague” feel that you want to project, the most critical aspect of your interview (at least for a research-focused position) is your research presentation. If you give a bad talk, you are toast. If you give a great talk, you can rise above other candidates even with better CVs. In fact, you really must give a great talk. It not only casts your research in the best possible light in the way you want it to be viewed, but it also indirectly shows your teaching ability and how likely you are to be interactive and engaging as a colleague. So how to do it?

Follow the baby-werewolf-silver bullet approach to structuring your talk and/or elements within your talk. I have written a previous blog on this topic.

Link your work to general theory. Following from the above, the baby should be presented in a very general way. Importantly, the baby/werewolf is not your study system or your experimental approach, at least not usually. (Instead, your study system or experimental approach is the silver bullet.) The baby/werewolf is instead some general theory or question that is of interest to many people, presented independently of your study system and in explicit reference to formal theory or meta-analytic results or famous previous studies. You want everyone in the audience thinking “Yes, that is an important problem that needs to be solved if we are truly understand the way the world works.” Then you want them thinking “Yes, that is a great way to address that problem.”

Don’t oversimplify. When presenting to a general department, the temptation can be to “make it understandable to everyone.” While this is a laudable goal, you really can’t water down your research or it will simply seem trivial to anyone that actually knows something about it. You need to show your data, not just the model fits. You need to specifically mention the statistical models you used. You need to actually describe the experiments. Importantly, however, you also need to explain your work in a way that even non-specialists can grasp the key elements and their importance and suitability. Perhaps the best way is to explain things twice: once the technically appropriate way and once the simple way.

Found here

Don’t describe too many projects. Hiring committees generally want to see someone who is going to be a world expert in some particular topic, not a dilettante who jumps from one random project to another. Thus, you want to present an integrated and multi-faceted approach to a particular important question (baby/werewolf) in which your work has the potential to be world-altering, paradigm-shifting, game-changing, and all those sorts of things your letter writers have said about you but which you can't explicitly state yourself. Of course, some people really do work on several entirely different topics that are not closely related to each other. In such cases, I still generally suggest focusing on only one of the topics in your talk, unless you have a clear expectation that some of the audience is specifically interested in one aspect of your work and some other segment of the audience is specifically interested in the other aspect. In such cases, you can present both but you need to explain why you are doing so.

Talk about the work you will do next. At the end of your talk, describe some of the projects (but not too many) that you will do when you are hired. These would ideally be logical – but not trivial – extensions of what you have already been doing. You don’t want to go into too much detail about experimental design as it can leave you open to criticism about things you haven't even done yet; but you should at least make it clear that you have an idea of what you will do next and how you will achieve it. As a more specific example, many people in my fields of ecology and evolution say they are going to use Next-Gen Sequencing methods. Nearly everyone says this even if they have no experience with it and no clear reason why it is an important next step for their research. As a result, it can seem like you have methods-envy and are saying something that you think folks want to hear just because they want to hear it. If you are going to say that you are going the genomics (or equivalent) route, then you need to have a clear reason why it is necessary and important. That is, the genomics must be the silver bullet that is clearly necessary to kill the werewolf. It can’t simply be something you are doing because you think folks are expecting it or because “we need a complete picture of what is happening.”

Don’t say “that’s a great question”. By way of illustration, I will relate a personal anecdote. When I was answering questions during an interview for a faculty position in 2000, I said for the first question That is a great question. Then I paused and said out loud (as it was crossing my brain in real time) Why do we always say that before questions? If we say it for everything, then it means nothing; that, in fact, no questions are great. And, if you don’t say it for one question, does that mean the question is not great? The audience looked amused or at least bemused. Then I went on to answer the question. I was still mulling over what I had said as the next question was being asked, and so I responded histrionically That is an OUTSTANDING question. This time some folks in the audience actually laughed out loud. Then I answered the question. Then, at the start of my response to the third question, I said That is a really awful question. This time, the whole audience burst out in loud guffaws. It turned out that the third person was internally famous for asking ridiculous questions and I had timed my comment just perfectly. However, I didn’t get the job. Perhaps my flippant comments were the reason or perhaps it reflected the search committee’s chair’s first words to me I don’t even know why we are interviewing you, you are totally unsuitable for the position. In fact, knowing that I wasn’t going to get the position was perhaps one reason I felt emboldened to say what was on my mind.

As a related point, make sure to leave room for questions at the end – your talk should only be about 45 minutes but not much shorter. During questions, make sure you respond at length and with deliberation. (Don’t just say Yes, you are right and then move on to the next question.) If the question doesn’t make sense, say something like OK, I am not sure precisely what you mean – I look forward to discussing it more with you later over beers – but I will for the moment convert your question into one that I can actually answer. A response like this is often good for a chuckle, which again makes you seem fun and engaging.

One problem that I might have introduced with all of the above advice is that you will begin to overthink everything during the interview when you really should be relaxed. So here is a more general suggestion that hopefully facilitates all of the above my more organically. When you go for the interview, pretend that you are already a faculty member at University X and that you have been invited to give a seminar at University Y. This mindset will hopefully help to make all of the above flow more naturally and without conscious thought DURING the interview.

Finally, note that many website give additional more specific advice - just type "job interview academia" into Google.

Now go out there and kill that interview.

How to Get a Faculty Position I

https://shaneomara.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/what-use-are-phds-what-future-do-they-have/

Most graduate students starting at research-intensive universities state that their career goal is to become a tenured faculty member at a research-intensive university; yet the fraction that ultimately do become faculty members is very low (less than 1% by some estimates - see above figure). This transition from doe-eyed starting graduate student to hardened, one might say wizened, veteran fleeing to non-academic pursuits can be traumatic (see a particularly angst-ridden example here). One of the greatest bottlenecks in this process occurs for postdocs trying to get a faculty position, which occurs at a rate of about 10% in the Life Sciences (see graph below). In hopes of assisting the dedicated and motivated people who wish to make it through this bottleneck with the fewest possible scars and in the best possible position, I will now generate a couple of posts on “How To Get a Faculty Position.” These posts follow almost sequentially from my earlier “How To” posts.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-many-phds-actually-get-to-become-college-professors/273434/

Given that blog posts do not increase the total number of faculty positions in existence (Now that would be a really useful post), they can at best influence the particular people who make it through the bottleneck. One might cynically view this attempted help as unhelpful because, for everyone it helps (someone who might not have gotten a position without the post), it hurts someone else (someone who would have gotten a position if the other people hadn’t read the post). I prefer to view the attempt more positively: perhaps this post will help everyone cast themselves in the best possible light and thereby help the best individuals to the best possible positions. From an evolutionary perspective, perhaps we could say that this post might help to optimize the assortative pairing of individuals and positions based on merit.

My advice on “How to get a faculty position” will proceed in three posts, which I will write in the weeks/months to come. Each is quite different from the others. This first post is likely to be the most obvious one (with a few surprises), and the novel suggestions will increase through subsequent posts. Importantly, my comments apply most directly to research institutions and North America, although many of them will apply more generally.

1.  Getting the interview.

2. Succeeding in the interview

3. Guaranteeing success

Getting the interview

Your job application package will consist of (give-or-take) a cover letter, your CV, letters of recommendation, a research statement, a teaching statement, and your extra-package profile (the people you know and your internet presence). By far the most important part of this package is your CV, with (in my opinion) your extra-package profile often being second-most important.

Probably the most important aspect of your research statement is to portray a research program, rather than a list of projects or topics. Most members of a hiring committee want to see that you have the potential be the world leader in some particular area of science, which will normally require a multi-pronged approach to a single important and broad topic. Thus – to the extent possible – weave together a narrative (with subheadings) that first introduces an important research topic (cute baby!), then outlines how your past research informed that topic and how new research is critical (a werewolf!), and then describes how you have a series of projects (use subheadings) that all address those research needs (silver bullets!). Here is my post on the baby-werewolf-silver bullet approach to writing. An additional point is that your statement should be modest in length, at least in terms of text (I would guess max two pages and ideally less), but with cool images and figures that provide nice sign posts and breaks from reading. Remember that – at this first stage – search committee members are reading very quickly and you need to keep and maintain their attention.

Baby - Werewolf - Silver Bullet.

Teaching statements tend to be blah blah blah BS, and I doubt many committees at research-intensive universities weight them much – unless they show evidence of teaching excellence, such as awards. Thus, keep your teaching statement focused and simple. First describe your teaching approach. In some ways, this is just a necessary hoop to jump through as everyone says the same blah blah blah about active learning and engaging students and integrating research, etc. However, you can stand out if you cleverly highlight really unique aspects of your teaching, such as through links to videos of you teaching in a unique way (see example below) or through screen captures of webpages or twitter feeds or whatever. As an additional point, I suggest you don’t list a huge number of courses that you could potentially teach at the university you are applying to. This looks rather desperate and most research-intensive universities won’t want you to teach too much. Instead, say something like “I would be happy contributing to the core biology curriculum and field courses, and I would be excited to develop my own upper-level course on ….”

Comment from Steve Heard: You are absolutely right about the common blah-blah, but I think these are valued more than you suggest except at the biggest research universities.  For me what makes the difference is concrete experience and plans.  Everyone says they want lecturers to be dynamic.  A good statement adds "and I'll accomplish that by doing X, which I did in my course or which I saw Dr. X do in a course when I sat in to learn from her award-winning teaching".  Few statements I see do this. And you don't have to actually have teaching experience to do it; you can say something concrete you've observed and admired, and why.

An example of how you can make your teaching profile interesting: YOUTUBE

Your CV is by far the most important part of your application, and the most important part of your CV is your publications. Thus, the primary determinant of getting a job interview has nothing to do with how you write your application but rather with the work that you have already done. Previous posts in this How To series should help with bolstering your academic record. Here I will instead provide a few tips on how to convert your accomplishments into a CV that brings your best work to the fore in a situation where committee members are doing a very quick triage and then later deliberation of a “long list” of suitable candidates.

The key elements of your CV are typical: experience, awards, publications, grants, teaching, reviewing, editorial work, and so on. Here I will concentrate more on details in how you order and construct some of these elements. (1) Get your publications up front in your CV – these are the most important things for most universities (you can also have a short list of courses before the publications – course details can appear later if you like). (2) Underline your name in the author list as some committee members want to assess your first- (and sometimes last-) authored contributions and these guideposts really help them. (3) Put “in press” papers in normal chronological order (most recent first) with the rest of your publications. (4). For the above papers, I would separate “full journal papers” (or something like that) from “notes/comments/responses/reviews/book chapters” by putting the latter in a separate section after the full papers. (5) AFTER the above, put your “in review” and “in revision” papers in a separate section. (6) AFTER this last, you can put “in prep” papers in a separate section. In reality, I would only list such potential papers if don’t have many papers in the other sections. Overall, listing in prep papers just makes you look like you aren’t confident in the strength and quantity of you actual papers and, of course, committee members know that “in prep” papers are a dime a dozen, that some won’t ever be published, and that, even if they are published, it might take a long time and often won’t be in the form they are listed anyway.

The last point just made in the above paragraph was my first hint to the importance of not puffing up your CV with hot air. When you do this, it is always clear to the readers, it makes it harder for them to find the key stuff, and it makes them view you as unconfident about your own CV. An additional point along these lines will initially seem counter-intuitive: you might not want to list ALL of your papers on some applications. That is, if you have a decent number of papers, then you might want to leave off the really minor, peripheral ones unless they have particular relevance to the position or university or search committee members. Having a lot of minor papers in your CV can (1) make your good papers less obvious, (2) imply that you “waste your time” on minor papers, (3) be interpreted by some to suggest you chase “minimum publishable units”, and so on. Thus, if you have ten papers in “good” journals and two in the Open Journal of the Southwest Alabama Natural History Society, then your CV might look better without the latter. Omitting some papers isn’t misleading as nothing legally or even morally compels you to list everything you have published in your CV. (Also, all your publications will be evident online anyway.) If such omissions stress you out, you can simply title your publication section as “Relevant Publications.”

A few other points about CV presentation: (1) Just before your list of publications, perhaps include a very short executive summary listing the number of papers published, your total number of citations (Google Scholar and Web of Science), and your h-index (Google Scholar and Web of Science). For a fast-reading committee member, this summary acts like an abstract telling them they should look further. (2) Make sure to list major and prestigious awards and research grants (with dollar amounts) that you have obtained – these (if short) can go before your publications. Note that for research grants, you can list awards you wrote even if you weren’t listed as a PI (sometimes grads or postdocs write grants for PIs), although you need to make this distinction clear. Also, if you do have some prestigious awards and major grants, it is probably not helpful to list the minor ones. This advice falls into the same “hot air” category as puffing up your list of papers, with all of the same attendant problems. (3) If some papers have received particular attention (media, citations, F1000), you can note this after the paper in the list of publications. (4) Do list things like talks given, posters presented, and journals reviewed for; but these are of relatively minor importance, so put them toward the end of the CV. An exception would be any keynote addresses, which (as long as there aren’t too many) can also be listed before the publications.

If you wish to see my CV, which includes some (but not all) of these elements, you can look here. Of course it is important to remember that the elements of the CV should be tailored to the type of job you are applying for. For instance, teaching experience and awards should be given more emphasis for a teaching-focused university.

The cover letter is the one thing that, apart from your publication list, will be read by everyone (or nearly everyone) on the committee. Thus, make it a SHORT (certainly no more than one page) executive summary of the key points: state your general research area (baby-werewolf-silver bullet), state any major awards, state your number of papers and note some of the best journals) and citations and h index, give your dollar amounts for grants, and list teaching interests. Importantly, don’t give a huge list of people who you think you could collaborate with in the department. This makes you seem desperate for approval and the people you mention might read it and think “Huh, I don’t see myself collaborating with this person.” Moreover, it will again (hot air) diminish any comments you make about very clear likely collaborations within the department. Instead, say something like “I can see immediate collaborative opportunities with PROFESSOR 1 and PROFESSOR 2 and I am excited about the possibility of exploring other potential collaborations within the department and university.” Of course, cover letters can get tiresome after you write a bunch of them, which might lead you to drastic actions such as this, which led to the below.

Letters of recommendation are essentially a check on what you are asserting about yourself. Thus, their most important role is to “not fuck up your application” by saying something bad about you. By this I mean that a great letter of recommendation can move you slightly in a ranking of applicants, but a bad letter can kill you even if you have a great CV. Thus, you need to make sure you are getting good letters of recommendation, which can start by (when in doubt) asking your letter writers “would you be able to write me a good letter of recommendation”. Of course, most letter writers won’t want to say that they will write you a bad letter, so you can instead more subtly ask them who they think would be your optimal letter writers. That way, they can recommend someone else “who is more suitable” without implying they would write a bad letter. It does help to have a big-name person write the letter but some big-name people are so busy, and have seen so many good people, that they might write a very short or less-than-enthusiastic letter. Thus, only ask big-name people who you have actively collaborated with. Alternatively, you can ask for a letter of recommendation from your Mom, excerpt below.

Your extra-application profile can be very important in two main arenas. First, you can sometimes have a real champion within the search committee who knows you; someone who has seen you present something or has had a beer with you in the pub at a conference. The key point here goes back to early How To posts that commented on the value of networking. In short, talk to visiting speakers and people at conferences, give lots of talks at conferences and lab groups, collaborate with lots of people, and so on. Also blogging and tweeting and the like can really help your profile as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of your research. Second, probably every candidate who makes the long list (usually folks with a good publication record given their career state) will be scrutinized by all (or most) of the committee members for their online profile. Thus, you really want to have a good website and you really really want to have a profile on Google Scholar, which provides a completely objective summary of your contributions.

I am sure I have missed a bunch of other stuff and I am also sure that some of my suggestions won’t be optimal for all positions, including some teaching-focused universities. However, my experience on job search committees suggests that the above points can help present your application in the best light and thus increase your chances of an interview. Once you get the interview, an entirely different set of guidelines applies, and that will be the focus of the next post.