If you are not writing a cover letter specifically for a given role – you should really ask yourself if you even care enough to bother applying for that role. This is what I did and ended up applying to so few places.

It takes work and time to make sure each cover letter is perfect for that particular role. This is why I applied to only six total postdocs and fellowships!

People thought that was crazy. But I got interviews for ALL but one of them.

The truth is I don’t care about everything and that’s a good thing.

By the time you are applying for postdocs, it is not cute to like everything anymore. You want to be highly skilled, choosy, passionate, opinionated, and annoyingly specific, in order to make a strong case.

For the cover letter sample provided here, I was selling my background in a particle astrophysics balloon-payload experiment in Antarctica to apply for a job doing a different particle astrophysics balloon-payload experiment in Antarctica. The detection methods (RF antennas vs Si(Li) detectors) and science questions (ultra-high-energy neutrinos vs dark matter detection) addressed by each experiment were actually quite distinct from each other, however, there was enough in common between them (broadly, both were in the field of particle astrophysics, both balloon payloads, both in Antarctica) to make a case for the postdoc.

If you don’t care that much about the particular postdoc position, then there are plenty of other jobs that are not a postdoc where you will probably make more money, have better benefits, and have to work less hard. So, for postdocs, I would recommend only applying if you actually care enough. In which case, the cover letter and research statement should be relatively easy to write and make specific for that role. 

Check out the podcast episode for more specific tips!

Podcast episode on Writing a Cover Letter: 

Full blog post:

https://howtophd.org/2020/07/how-to-write-a-cover-letter-for-a-postdoctoral-application.html