Creating a Faculty-Type Dossier: Key to Your Application for a Faculty Appointment

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!