Creating the Documents for the research application

I was asked for 5 types of documents in general:
Research Statement
Teaching Statement
Curriculum Vitae
Publication List
Cover Letter

I found particularly useful the career center at the University of Rochester, a person helped me with the grammar, how to apply to postdocs and guided me to understand how to apply for industry jobs. For now I will concentrate on the documents.

Maybe what was most useful for me was to understand that you apply to types of jobs. I mean, I was applying to Research and Teaching jobs, so my CV and Cover Letters were optimized for it. That helps to make the people understand that you are interested on the job, and makes your application stronger. 

Here are some recommendations:

1) Try to have the same template for every single document, that will give a nice look to your documents.
Actually my research statement does not have the same template, since I needed to make it an article (latex), but all the other including the teaching statement and the publication list have a similar template.

2) For the Cover Letter make sure to include the name of the position that you are applying to. I have heard ( happened to a friend of mine ) to end up in a different program. So make sure to have something like: "to apply for ... position" or Subject: position candidacy. Also, make sure that you have contact information on every single document of your application, that will make it easy for the job committee to contact you and your documents will not get lost.

My CV has my contact info on every page, the rest on the first page. My Cover letter is one page long ( really should not exceed this ), the length of the documents will vary depending on the type of job that you are applying to, I'm mainly interested in jobs with research with some teaching, so my Research Statement has 7 pages ( 5 without bibliography and image ), Teaching Statement has 2, CV has 3, Publication list 1 ( 1 published, 2 in progress ).

3) The Teaching statement is not philosophy, is more like a compilation of stories that you want to tell, about how you interact with the students, what you try to do in class, and what are your points of views in teaching, what are your successes and such... Please not about what is the meaning or role of teaching or a teacher.

4) Make sure that the name of the files are descriptive, for example:
Alejandro_Gomez_University_Of_Rochester_Cover_Letter_Postdoc_December_2011_Berkeley.pdf
you get the idea.

If you want to have any of my documents send me an email... I will reply with one of my applications.

I seriously recommend that a professional checks your application, I had the chance to work with Burt Nadler at the career center and it helped me a lot, here are some links that you might found useful:

http://www.rochester.edu/careercenter/

https://www.math.lsu.edu/grad/handbook/hb9

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~mgsa/w/index.php?title=Applying_for_Postdocs#Cover_letter

http://www.ams.org/profession/career-info/new-phds/emp-academic-job-search

http://blogs.ams.org/onthemarket/2011/09/23/applications-for-academic-jobs/

http://www.experience.com/entry-level-jobs/

I ended up buying a book on how to write in English, for my future articles and documents :).

Websites to have in mind

Last Update: October 8, 2012

Background:
This blog is about my experience on applying for postdocs, and useful material that I have found for that. 
I'm a Colombian student at the University of Rochester working in Probability. My intentions are to get a job in a research university almost in any place in the world. 


Note: I will continue to update this page, so whenever you come back you might find it a bit different. 


Please put comments if you have any info, that might be useful, you think that is interesting or you just liked the idea of the blog. 


As a general comment, the application is different if you are a citizen of that country ( the one that you are applying to ) or not. If you look actively for scholarships and programs in your country that support researchers you may find a lot of opportunities. If you want to go to another country that is not your own, you have to look at the way it is usually done in that country and look for programs that the country offers, which might be quite limited. 
This is supposing that you don't have a particular contact in a university and such... that is bare handed. 


All: 
-  http://www.scholars4dev.com/
Scholarships, even for PhD level.
- http://www.math-jobs.com/
Note: there are two math jobs websites if not more (?), this one is more international but you should definitely look at both!.


Europe:
- http://www.euro-math-soc.eu/
- http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/people/
- http://ec.europa.eu/euraxess/index.cfm
- http://www.universia.es/index.htm
- http://fellowship.ercim.eu/
- http://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/
Scholarships and more.

USA
Mathjobs is a great place, most jobs are posted there, but if you are US citizen check the other resources!
- www.nsf.gov
- http://www.nsf.gov/funding/
- http://rochester.edu/college/fellowships/
- https://career.berkeley.edu/infolab/Fellow.stm
- http://www.ams.org/home/page
- www.mathjobs.org ( they have RSS for jobs! )
as a comment, check the documents required for each university... I ended up doing some cover letters that we not required :/ , oh! well... 
- www.mathprograms.org ( they have RSS and you should continue to monitor this website )
- www.experience.com/entry-level-jobs/

Canada
Similar to the USA, actually I do not know much about the process.


Brazil
Most universities release a public notification, and you get there as a professor if you pass an exam, if you want to work as a postdoc the best is to make contact with one professor that is well established there. 
- http://arsphysica.wordpress.com/2011/01/01/aplicando-para-doutorado-em-fisica-nos-eua/
- IMPA
- USP, Sao Paulo and Sao Carlos
- http://www.cnpq.br/bolsas/index.htm
Scholarships from CNPq
- http://fapesp.br/en/
Scholarships Fapesp ( In the state of Sao Paulo )


Colombia
- http://www.colciencias.gov.co/convocatorias
- Universidad de los Andes
- Universidad Nacional, Bogota, Antioquia


Chile
- Universidad Católica
- Universidad de Chile


Netherlands
Every university posts on their website
- http://lists.imstat.org/mailman/listinfo/stoch-ned 
- http://mailman.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/stoch-ned-l
Dutch Stochastic Group and Dutch Stochastic Community respectively, but I suspect they are the same mailing list.


Germany
Every university posts on their website
- www.st-net.zib.de/index_en.html
- Mailing list:  http://listserv.zib.de/mailman/listinfo/st-net
- http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/humboldt-fellowship-postdoc.html
Humboldt Scholarships, for researchers outside of Germany ( most likely has something for researchers in Germany too )

Japan
- http://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-fellow/fy2012/appli_long_2012.html


Korea
- mathjobs.org has a couple of posts
- http://www.kms.or.kr/eng/ or  www.kms.or.kr
Korean Mathematical Society website
Universities or places to look: Seuol National University, KIAS, KAIST

Singapore:
- http://www.contactsingapore.sg/careerssg/research/us/apr2012

Australia:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Scientific_and_Industrial_Research_Organisation
- http://www.csiro.au/


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Useful links for you
CV, Research Statement, Teaching Statement, Cover letter, etc...
- https://www.math.lsu.edu/grad/handbook/hb9
- http://blogs.ams.org/onthemarket/2011/09/23/applications-for-academic-jobs/

Listserv lists:
- http://probweb.berkeley.edu/news.html
- http://mathstore.ac.uk/?q=node/1447


I will let you know how my process goes, so far I feel overwhelmed by the amount of universities and letters of recommendation.


As a comment, I created a folder for each application and I plan to put the documents and comments for each application so I will know what is submitted and what is not.