What are some tips on becoming a U.S. Marshal?

What are some tips on becoming a college professor?

• after getting the necessary degree..... what are some good tips on how to market yourself appropriately to get colleges to hire you?

• Answer:

  Virtually every academic field of specialization has a professional organization. These hold annual conferences that include job interviews and opportunities for potential candidates to meet members of the search committees and present their CV's. Prior to the conference, colleges and universities with jobs to offer to post these in the organization's official bulletin. The job listings can usually be found on the organization's website and include all requirements. You generally need to be a member of the organization to access all of the information, so PhD candidates must join whatever professional group is relevant to their field. Lower membership fees are made available to grad students. In this day and age, it is common for people about to complete PhD's to apply for post-doctoral fellowships along with jobs and to hold a post-doc or two (or three or four) before attracting the attention of a search committee with a tenure-track job to offer. Or, new PhD's may hold two or more adjunct teaching jobs, or one-year appointments, for a few years while they are searching for a full-time tenure-track position. During this period, they will be trying to get work published, since the best way to interest a search committee is to do exactly that -- to get articles into scholarly, professional journals and to have a book in progress. The first book is usually based on or is an expansion of the doctoral dissertation, and one of the purposes of a post-doctoral fellowship is to prepare a dissertation for publication and get a publishing contract. (In the sciences, things work a bit differently, but publishing is also the goal.) It is possible to land a tenure-track job while you are still in the last stages of completing your dissertation, but for this, you need the help and support of faculty in your graduate department -- particularly of your dissertation advisor. With luck, he or she will have connections to the members of the relevant search committee, and your dissertation topic will be something that interests faculty at schools with positions to offer. You need a very-up-to-date, cutting-edge topic, excellent public-speaking (and schmoozing) ability should you be short-listed and invited to give a paper to the department, and, as I said, much support from the faculty who have taught you. It will help enormously if you have delivered papers, as a grad student, at the major annual conferences and gotten to know some significant figures in your field before you ever apply for jobs. In other words, you need to start preparing for the job market well BEFORE you complete the necessary degree. You should be discussing this with your professors from the moment you start work on a PhD, so as to be sure that you know what the professional organizations are, how to join them, how the job market in that field works, who the major figures are, and so forth, and at what venues grad students can present papers -- and how to get those papers accepted for conference sessions. Oh, by the way, it also helps to be awarded prestigious fellowships to support your PhD work while you are a grad student. These may be available through your university or from outside sources.