Tips
Overall Advice
- This is where the evaluators get to know your unique story as a coherent narrative – align this to the promotion track you have chosen and your main strengths
- Review examples from previous submissions to get a feeling for structure
- Attend workshops organized by the School of Medicine to help prepare your packet
- Emphasize your strongest attributes based on your promotion track and accomplishments
- Engage in graceful self-promotion
- Sell yourself without sounding arrogant
- Have your Personal Statement reviewed for feedback by your mentor(s) and then by the chair of the faculty development committee before submitting them for your final packet.
Audience
- Reviewers – with relevant expertise
- Non-Neurology faculty (medical faculty outside your
specialty, faculty throughout the institution, Board of Trustees) - Statement cannot be highly technical. It must be pleasant read, understandable by a broad audience, while being sophisticated.
Organization
- 5 pages maximum
- Discuss briefly your background
- Cover each promotion area – scholarship, teaching, service
- Order of areas depends on track and areas of distinction
- Start with greatest area of distinction
- Address work at the departmental, SOM, university, local, national, and international levels
- If a weakness, contextualize it
Opportunity to
- Tell your professional story – coherent narrative
- Highlight most meaningful accomplishments
- Extract from CV what is most important
- Differentiate self from mentor(s)
- Be creative about how you frame information
- Explain where things overlap
- Address future directions in your career
Background (very brief, paragraph)
- Who you are – job description
- Why on particular track (if relevant – e.g., track switch)
- How you got where you are – career trajectory
- Life style changes that might explain a lag
Scholarship
- Summarize research interests
- Set self up in the field you are in
- Focus on a few research topics
- Discuss impact of your work, how it shifted the field, and how it is unique/different
- Convey ways work has reached out
- Address number and quality of publications and mention key papers and journal
- Note funding success for research (federal, private)
- Note media recognition
- Emphasize collaborations (inside and outside of Emory)
- See NIH document on Team Science
- Your unique role in team science, as a Co-Investigator
- Future research plans and how this will result in new publications and grants
- Link future with present
Teaching (Most important for Clinical and MEST tracks)
- Where are you teaching
- Who learners are
- Philosophy of teaching (covered more in Teaching Portfolio)
- Courses taught institutionally, locally, nationally, internationally
- Courses organized
- Supervision
- Dissertation and thesis committees
- Mentoring
- Lectures given locally
- Lectures given at another university
- Lectures given nationally and internationally
- Comments on your evaluations
Service
- Unique service roles and responsibilities
- Leadership roles – department, SOM, institution, locally, nationally, internationally
- Need to emphasize your contributions to the field
- Clinical service
- Infrastructure service
- Running a service core
- Committee membership and role
- Boards
- Manuscript reviewing, editorial boards, special issues, and editing
- Study section responsibilities (ad hoc, member)
- Organization of meetings
- Organization of symposia
- Teaching administration (though could go under service)
- Collaborations
- Consulting (e.g., for nonprofit organization)
- Community Outreach
- Talks/presentations/panel discussions
- Health fairs and science fairs
- Media – public education
- Serving on boards
- Coordinating community activities