We would like every applicant to have access to the conventions and expectations that will guide our review process. Please review the information on this page to learn more about the Department of Geography and what we are looking for in applications for the Assistant Professor in Climate Science position.
For our assistant professor position in Climate Science, we are asking for a cover letter, your curriculum vitae, and the names of three references. Candidates who advance beyond the initial round of reviews will be asked to submit teaching and research statements. All materials should be written in your own voice and avoid using Generative AI.
Your cover letter should introduce yourself as a scholar and as a teacher. It should be 1-2 pages single-spaced. Your cover letter should briefly introduce us to your research area and teaching interests/background. Additionally, your cover letter should connect your approaches to teaching to a predominantly undergraduate liberal arts environment. The goal of the cover letter is to spotlight the most significant aspects of your work, so that we understand your career thus far as you see it, and how you see yourself connecting with our advertised position here at Colgate.
Your CV should list all of your education and any academic appointments you have held, with dates, as well as your publications. If you have held non-academic positions that you consider relevant or that might help us to understand your intellectual trajectory, feel free to include them, but don’t feel obligated. For publications, please include any works in progress that you have started drafting. You are welcome to include significant conference presentations as well. If your publications include student co-authors you have mentored, it can be helpful to indicate those. Also, we would appreciate a list of any classes you have taught, with instructor of record vs. teaching assistant clearly indicated.
At the initial application, we don’t need reference letters, but we would like the names of your recommenders in the appropriate section on the Interfolio application. If we would like to receive letters, we’ll contact you, so that you can request them from your reference-writers. It may be helpful to let your recommenders know that you have applied for this position. If they have not drafted a letter for you before, it would be helpful for them to at least begin thinking about the letter because the turnaround time for requests can be quick.
As noted in the job advertisement, a Teaching Statement will only be requested from applicants who advance beyond the initial review stage. Typically, your statement will be 2 - 3 pages, single-spaced. We’re looking for evidence that you have thought deeply about teaching and are committed to being a successful teacher and mentor at a predominantly undergraduate small liberal arts college. You can provide this evidence by addressing some of the following questions. You should not feel compelled to address all of the questions.
- What elective courses would you feel best prepared to teach? Would you be willing/able to teach a laboratory/field component for any of these electives? What ideas do you have for teaching across our curriculum?
- What are your goals for students? You might pick a course and explain what you hope students will take from it. How will you design your teaching of the course to make that happen?
- In addition to teaching in biology, we expect our faculty to teach courses to a general audience of students in our Liberal Arts Core Curriculum. Most scientists teach in the Core: Sciences component, where the main objective is to teach first- and second-year students about the scientific process and how science interacts with society. What ideas do you have for teaching in this Core component?
- Describe a teaching experience you’ve had. What did you do that you were proud of? What did you learn from the experience, and what would you do differently in the future? How would that teaching be similar to or different from your teaching at Colgate?
- What have you learned about teaching, outside of your direct experience as a teacher? What effective instructional practices did you observe when you were a student? What are you particularly interested in trying at Colgate?
- Teaching can also occur in laboratory settings. How have your experiences mentoring students in the research lab and/or in a classroom laboratory influenced how you approach teaching?
We recognize that you cannot include all of this information in a statement of reasonable length, so we encourage you to focus on what matters most to you. While a separate DEI statement is not required, your teaching philosophy should describe how you engage students from diverse backgrounds. Also, feel free to write about things that are important to you but that we have not included on this list. Above all, we are interested in understanding who you are as a teacher and scholar.
As noted in the job advertisement, a Research Statement will only be requested from applicants who advance beyond the initial review stage. Colgate is a selective liberal arts college committed to excellence in undergraduate education. It is also recognized by the Carnegie Classification as being in the group of “Research Colleges and Universities,” based on Colgate’s commitment to advancing faculty scholarship. Your research statement should be ~2-3 pages long and should be written for a non-specialist. It should briefly explain the highlights of your research efforts to date, and then should explain the next steps in your research plan at Colgate. Colgate faculty are productive scholars, and so your research plans should address one or more important questions in your field and explain how your research at Colgate might start to address those questions.
Your research plans should also be mindful of Colgate’s undergraduate setting, taking into consideration ways in which students would be involved in the proposed research through summer projects, connections to course work, or through academic year research advising. Many geography majors conduct a senior research project, but students as early as their first year might also work with faculty and receive student wages or academic credit. Funding to support faculty scholarship is available from a variety of sources including the Division of Social Sciences, the Faculty Research Council, and through external grants.
Are there methodological approaches that are defining aspects of your scholarship? If so, you might briefly introduce those in your statement and describe how you might approach those in Colgate’s predominantly undergraduate liberal arts environment. How will your research engage students from diverse backgrounds?
Courses in geography span the discipline, reflecting faculty expertise in human, nature-society, and physical geography. Students are broadly exposed to the major subfields of geography in our 100 and 200 level courses, and all of our majors are trained in GIS. Students apply their broad geographic knowledge in topically focused 300 level courses, and the 400 level senior research seminar. Students may major in Geography or Environmental Geography, the latter being a major jointly administered with the Environmental Studies program. Our students typically study abroad in their junior year, and many participate in our faculty lead program at the University of Wollongong in Australia.
Many of our students participate in faculty lead research, both during the academic year and during the summer. We have robust facilities and resources that enable cutting-edge research, and our faculty actively publish and write grants to further support their research. The Geography department is housed in the Ho Science Center with dedicated access to state-of-the-art classroom, laboratory and collaborative spaces.
Colgate is a small liberal arts college, despite having “university” in the name. We are an almost entirely undergraduate institution, committed to a rigorous and engaging liberal arts curriculum. Thus, in addition to choosing a major, our students take a range of classes across the curriculum. Our students work at a very high caliber, and they expect to be challenged. Colgate takes the liberal arts education model very seriously indeed, which translates into an emphasis on intellectual inquiry, rather than practical professional training. We all see ourselves as researchers, and we bring our scholarly interests into the classroom with us.
You can find additional information about Colgate’s support of our faculty and information about Central New York, where we are situated on our Introducing Colgate website.