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Most recently these pages have focused on telling your story. First was a focus on the 3-page narrative for A&P educator promotion. A more in-depth approach involves the OAA faculty dossier and a faculty-type dossier. The former is required for all OSU faculty, the latter you might use in a faculty job search. As promised, this post goes one step further and talks about a CV (acronym for curriculum vita).
Unlike the “dossier” (listed 81 times in the most current version of OSU’s Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) Policies and Procedures Handbook - Volume 3), the “CV” is mentioned only 3 times. Fittingly, while your OAA dossier could very easily span 81 pages, your CV looks right at home contained in just 3. The CV should be brief. It should quickly and efficiently illustrate the focus of your efforts. It is perfectly happy being the bearer of “selected” accomplishments, activities, funding, etc. Sounds like a 3-page narrative, but it is different.
Like the 3-page narrative, your CV is the polite response to the question “so, what do you do?” It is the snapshot of how you spend your time and who you spend it with. It is your response to a typical interview prompt, “tell me a little bit about yourself”… but it is done in outline form.
How much do you share? Like so many other of life’s questions, the answer depends. In some circumstances, a potential funder may require that you provide a CV of a certain length (e.g. 1 or 2 pages). The CV you create and maintain to inform potential collaborators or your supervisor should be long enough to be useful and brief enough to quickly illustrate what you are about.
Starting out in your Extension career, you may find it difficult to cover 2 pages. However, over time you may be challenged to limit yourself to 3 pages. We do so much that we are excited to talk about! What I have found fun is to identify what can be dropped to make room for something better (or higher value) that more effectively tells your story. Yes, it happened and yes it mattered. Then, it mattered enough to earn a place in your CV. Now, it knows and you know that it helped you get better. Whatever that item currently under your scrutiny might be, it represents yet another building block under which this new accomplishment rests.
Growth over time is the goal. As you gain more recognition, more impactful or focused scholarly contributions, larger or more targeted funded projects, etc you will begin to see how those previously cherished entries enabled you to achieve these more recent accomplishments and contributions. But here is not the place to list them all (perhaps another post on another dossier-type). Here, we are building a story that fits nicely on (say it with me) just a few pages.
In short, creating and keeping your CV up to date should be fun. You have done the work. You are growing as a professional. The CV grows along with you (and like you, it gets better over time). Exercise your creativity in its layout and what you list (think resume). Find a look you like and copy it. Not sure where to start? Go here to see others.
You can also attend one of the virtual office hours focused on the topic of preparing a dossier noted below:
- Monday June 5, 2-3pm: https://osu.zoom.us/j/99525918755?pwd=aW0wckcwTkZOQUhxNFY0Mmh2MUlwdz09
- Wednesday, June 14, 9-10am: https://osu.zoom.us/j/93059777483?pwd=N2pYNTVtNU9VdHhoUTNxVkNzVGJRUT09
- Wednesday, July 12, 3-4pm: https://osu.zoom.us/j/94433000232?pwd=S1lkWkI2QzduRnBpOFc5WW9kTFkzUT09
Last time we ran through the dossier as a tool to tell your story. As a member of the faculty, the Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) dossier is key to your tenure, promotion, and the annual performance review (i.e. merit increase) processes at OSU. Read more here.
So now let’s assume you are not a member of the faculty but you aspire to be. There is also a faculty-type dossier that you might assemble and submit as part of your application packet for a faculty position. Our A&P IV educators who are interested in applying for a tenure track faculty position within the Department of Extension would assemble a dossier in this format.
The difference between the two is as subtle as the letters OAA. OAA dictates what is included in the OAA dossier for the purposes listed in the opening paragraph. OAA dictates the dossier outline and the contents within it, the focus and suggested length of the narrative sections, and how to represent your specific contributions in cases of collaborative effort.
On the other hand, a faculty-type dossier used in a job application need not necessarily resemble the dossier format required by OAA. Your goal in the job application is to tell your story in a way that efficiently and effectively illustrates your ability to be successful in a faculty role. Thinking of your past accomplishments, what best tells your story when assembled in a faculty-type dossier format? The goal isn’t to include everything you have ever done, every award you’ve ever won, every committee you’ve ever been a member of, or every program/teaching event you’ve ever conducted. Your task is to assemble the parts of a faculty-type dossier in a way that shows a balanced effort and professional growth over time in your teaching, creative/scholarly outputs, and service. In short, there are most likely a good number of items included in OAA’s faculty dossier outline that won’t apply to you. Adapting your own faculty-type dossier outline from that template probably fits you better.
If you have even the most remote interest in a faculty appointment, I encourage you to start on this faculty-type dossier today. It will be easier to build over time and probably beats the alternative approach in most cases (i.e. trying to find/collect/organize/report years of contributions and accomplishments in a fraction of the time spent making them).
How to start? If you have been a Vita user, you can run a dossier report from Vita (see previous post for instructions) and edit/build out via Word as a starting point. You can also download the OAA dossier outline (scroll down on this page about halfway), start your own Word document, edit a colleague’s, call me, etc. Key above all else is to get started!
Tags: faculty type dossier, A&P IV, application for faculty appointment, CV
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Last time we discussed the value of a 3-page narrative (a key part of your A&P promotion application). This 3-page narrative describes your unique position, highlights what you have accomplished in your current role, and describes the contributions you plan to make in your new role. You can read more about that here.
Building on that idea, this time we’ll focus on the dossier. The term “dossier” is listed 81 times in the most current version of OSU’s Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) Policies and Procedures Handbook - Volume 3. A faculty-type dossier is like a 3-page narrative in that it describes your unique position, highlights what you have accomplished, and includes sections for future plans.
The elements of a faculty-type dossier are prescribed in the OAA Core Dossier Template found in both Word and PDF formats here. Compared to a 3-page narrative, a dossier affords you much more opportunity for in-depth detail and therefore more readily illustrates a trajectory or pattern of professional growth over time.
Faculty at OSU must follow this dossier outline when compiling their accomplishments and contributions for tenure and/or promotion in rank. (Note: We’ll explore a dossier submitted as part of an application for a faculty position and the role and function of your CV in a future post – “CV” is mentioned only 3 times, BTW.) Your dossier as a member of the OSU faculty would include these three parts:
- Introduction - where you describe your position, your academic training, positions held, etc.
- Core Dossier - where you list and describe your teaching, scholarly/creative and service contributions and accomplishments in reverse chronological order
- Evaluation - which includes your teaching evaluation data such as EEET and/or SEI reports, Peer Evaluation of Teaching letters, etc. (remember, our APT requires 3 evaluations of teaching via EEET and 1 peer evaluation of teaching letter per year)
Much of the faculty dossier appears in lists and the lists are arranged in outline form. The contents are accompanied by narratives of a length “no longer than 750 words” (in most every case). Your narratives provide context for much of your dossier content. Narratives include:
- your biographical statement (found in the Introduction section)
- curriculum you have developed and/or revised
- your teaching approach, goals, accomplishments and future plans
- how you have used formal evaluation of instruction to improve your teaching
- focus of your research/creative/scholarly work including accomplishments and future plans
- indicators of the quality of your scholarly/creative work
- a description of goals and impact of your service and engagement
If you are feeling like this is a lot to be tracking and including in your dossier, there is some hope. OAA guidelines offer this on what to include:
- Probationary faculty (i.e., untenured faculty) should list teaching and service accomplishments since date of hire as faculty.
- Tenured faculty should list only those teaching and service accomplishments that occurred in the previous 5 years or since date of last promotion, whichever is most recent.
- All of your scholarly/creative contributions can be listed in your Research and Creative Activity section so long as you clearly denote all those since appointment or last promotion at OSU.
In short, the faculty dossier at OSU is a big deal. The dossier is required of all faculty as part of:
- the tenure review process
- promotion in rank
- annual performance review process
- so much more that I’d love to share but know I have already taxed your attention with this long post
One last item: For a number of years now the university has provided a faculty dossier platform (you may know of the current system referred to as Vita). Realizing the value of an institution-wide faculty information system, Interfolio has recently been chosen as the new platform for dossiers (and other key information to aid in reporting). This will replace the increasingly unstable Vita system. If you are a Vita user, please note that NONE OF YOUR EXISTING Vita data will be transferred or migrated to the new system. To preserve the content that enables you to most easily tell your story, please download your current dossier and any other valuable reporting data (e.g. Annual Performance Report) from Vita ASAP by clicking the large “Review Dossier” button at vita.osu.edu and then by clicking "Request Dossier". Once generated, you can click “Save as Word” in the upper right-hand corner of the generated dossier and edit as needed.