You will need a cover letter to introduce yourself to a prospective employer. Such a letter is much more important than you may think, so you should show a draft to colleagues before sending it out to schools. Since it is the first document from you that the school or company will see, you will want to make sure that it expresses your interest in the position in the most positive light. In fact, this last indicates a way to start your cover letter: "I saw in the AMS Notices that (your institution) has an opening for a statistician."

Make the first paragraph as specific to the position as possible. If you can't make a case for being the statistician (or topologist, or mathematics educator) that the school needs, are you sure you should be applying for this job? On the other hand, if there is some "outside" reason for your making the application - for instance, you have been in communication about your thesis with a faculty member at that institution - you should say so. Recall after all that you are the one trying to sell yourself. How can you best do this?

A second paragraph can set out your research to date in compressed form. You need not discuss your entire research career in this one paragraph; just give a short synopsis. Leave details to the vita ("As you will see from my Curriculum Vitae,...") or to the research statement ("I have provided more details in my Research Statement, which is included.").

In the next paragraph talk about your teaching. Again, be brief, setting out the bare-bones description of what you have taught and how students have responded. Lead the search committee to details in the CV and Teaching Statement. Mention any special teaching-related activities in this paragraph.

Of course it may be more appropriate in some cases to reverse the order of the middle paragraphs, so that teaching precedes research. Use your own judgment on this for each particular application.

A final paragraph can explain how the employer can get further information from or about you. Sentences starting with "I will be at the meetings in January" and "I can provide references" belong here.

A good rule of thumb is to try to keep the cover letter to no more than one and a quarter pages; search committees will not want any more than that. Word processors should ensure that you individualize the letter for each institution. You may feel that this takes too much time, but how much is an acceptance worth?

Preparing Your Cover Letter Online with UIC Stationery

If you have a math account, you can prepare your cover letters online with MSCS Stationery using the web macro:

Typeset a letter on MSCS Stationery

The macro prompts you to include all the relevant information, and the results looks great and very professional. Don't forget to save the pdf file it generates in some directory, say called "ApplicationLetters" and when saving, give each letter file generated a name corresponding to the school you are applying to.

It takes time to handle each letter in this way, but as the quote above says, "How much is an acceptance worth?" - surely it's worth a day spent composing these letters. The Job Search done properly is time-consuming.