If you are going on the academic job market in 2023–2024, this summer is the time to put your research together so you can showcase it to potential employers. But formatting from scratch your job-market paper, job-talk presentation, and job-market website takes a lot of time. To avoid spending too much time on this, consider using ready-made templates.
I have uploaded on GitHub a suite of minimalist templates. These templates are ready to use and completely free. You just need to install some free software and replace boilerplate with your own content to produce a job-market paper, job-talk presentation, and job-market website.
The paper template is available at https://github.com/pmichaillat/latex-paper . The GitHub repository contains the paper template, accompanying style files, a paper example, and a readme file explaining how to use the template. Just clone the repository to your local machine and it’s ready to use.
The template produces an academic paper with LaTeX . If you need to install LaTeX on a Mac, the easiest is to download MacTeX 2023 .
The paper format is minimalist so the paper is comfortable to read and easy to scan. The paper respects all of Butterick’s rules of typography .
Writing a job-market paper takes time, so it is good to start writing early and iterate during the summer. When I was in graduate school my advisors told me that it takes at least 10 tries to write to a good introduction—and they were right! So start writing as soon as possible.
The presentation template is available at https://github.com/pmichaillat/latex-presentation . The GitHub repository contains the presentation template, accompanying style files, a presentation example, and a readme file explaining how to use the template. Just clone the repository to your local machine and it’s ready to use.
The template produces an academic presentation using LaTeX Beamer . The Beamer package is shipped with MacTex.
The slide design is minimalist so slides are easy to scan during a presentation, and do not distract from the talk. The slides also respect Butterick’s rules of typography .
Writing a presentation often helps writing the paper. It helps isolate the key results of the project. It also helps frame the research question and answer. And because the amount of material contained on a slide is limited, it forces us to think about the best way to position the paper in the literature. (It goes without saying that a “literature slide” with a tiny font a 200 references is a big no-no.)
Accordingly, it makes sense to schedule your practice job talk as soon as possible in the fall. With such a deadline, you will have a first draft of the job-talk presentation ready by the end of the summer. And most likely, as a by-product, you will also have a first draft of the job-market paper ready by then! An early practice talk also leaves enough time to incorporates all of the audience’s comments into the job-market paper before applications are due—usually at Thanksgiving.
The last key part of the job-market package is the job-market website, which hosts the applicant’s CV, job-market paper, other research, teaching material, and contact information. The source code to my academic website is publicly available on GitHub as a template repository: https://github.com/pmichaillat/pmichaillat.github.io . Anyone can clone the repository to generate a new repository with the same directory structure and files and quickly create their own academic website. The code might also be helpful to anyone who wishes to recreate specific features of the website.
The website is built with Hugo , which is a very fast and completely free static website generator. The website design is based on PaperMod , which is a minimalist, fast, flexible, and free Hugo theme. My website is hosted GitHub Pages and deployed with GitHub Actions , which is a simple way to deploy a website hosted in a GitHub repository. I do pay for GitHub Pro, but you should also be able to host your website with the free version of GitHub.
The theme design has been customized for academic websites. The first goal was to obtain a minimalist website that is easy to navigate, fast to load, and easy to maintain. The second goal was to obtain a website that highlights the research and teaching material.
It might make sense to adapt the website slightly for the job market. The advice that I had received when I went on the job market was to place prominent links to the CV and job-market paper on the landing page. This is very good advice, and it’s easy to do on the website template by modifying the config.yml file. An easy modification is to add buttons for the job-market paper and CV below the social icons:
buttons: - name: Job-market paper url: "/jmp.pdf" - name: Curriculum vitae url: "/cv.pdf"
The files cv.pdf and jmp.pdf must be placed in the /static folder.
The documentation of the website’s source code is rudimentary. I aim to develop it in the future. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to ask on GitHub’s discussion forum .
