Your research: being necessary & useful
Dr Steve Joy At this time of year, many early career researchers are preparing job documents for academic applications. Lots of PhD students are in the throes of finishing up & preparing to move on; the competitions for Junior Research Fellowships are just around the corner; the US job market is about to go into full swing; and looking towards the autumn, which isn’t as far off as it might seem, there will be a spate of other deadlines. For all of these applications, you will need a persuasive, tautly worded pitch to describe your research. And this is the first place where most people go wrong. In my experience, there is a stunning consistency to the way early career researchers write about their research, and in the process they mark themselves out as inexperienced and lacking confidence. Here’s an example of the type, borrowing from my own half-forgotten research but modelled almost verbatim on a handful of real job documents from the past month: My research studies moderni