2 pieces of advice for writing academic cover letters: (1) your cover letter (and any accompanying statements) is an essay about your accomplishments & agenda. It should have a clear thesis statement & each paragraph should contain a specific piece of supporting information
We all tend to write these things chronologically, or to list off things we've done, but letters that shine instead describe a research (or teaching, or diversity) agenda that is specific, focused, and can be broken down into subcomponents that provide evidence.
(2) show don't tell. I actually got this advice from my high school guidance counselor. If you say "I encourage active learning in my classes" describe specifically how you do this in a class you teach (or plan to teach) using a specific example.
Similarly "I use multiple research methods" ok, then describe a research project (or 2 or 3) that demonstrates how you use multiple methods.
(this was prompted by advice I was giving to a friend - I realized that these were 2 good general principles).

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More from @ForrestFleisch1

15 Sep
India has attempted large scale forest restoration for decades. We have just published one of the first systematic evaluations of these efforts. We find that decades of tree planting have had almost no impact on forest canopy cover or rural livelihoods. A Thread.
These results are pretty disappointing: These plantations failed to achieve their goals. This failure also raises questions about the aims of global restoration and tree planting initiatives: Can they deliver on their ambitions plans?
The full paper is here. nature.com/articles/s4189… and I will post a link to the author's version (ungated) at my university repository once it is available (in a few hours)
Read 30 tweets
12 Jan
@reddmonitor has a great post summarizing a number of recent articles about "plant for the planet," which raise a host of interesting questions about the potential for tree planting & forest restoration to serve lofty goals. redd-monitor.org/2021/01/11/pla…
I got involved in this because I've done fieldwork in the area where Plant for the Planet's Mexican forests are. I was last there in 2015, so around the same time Plant for the Planet got started there. I can't report direct observations.
Much of @reddmonitor's post is a summary of an excellent piece of journalism by @herrfischer and @hannahknuth which you can read in the original German (or using a translator) here. zeit.de/2020/53/plant-…
Read 19 tweets
12 Jan
When the lofty goals of forest landscape restoration are put into practice, the rhetoric is replaced by a focus on planting trees, often in places where they don't belong. link.springer.com/article/10.100…
I've had a bunch of arguments with FLR advocates about this. Mostly, they boil down to a believe on the part of FLR advocates that their complex science-based prescriptions will be translated into careful on-the-ground action.
My own observations from S. Asia have always led me to be skeptical of this. Here are a set of similar cases from Africa.
Read 6 tweets
16 Sep 20
These days everyone seems to thinks that "planting trees" is an important solution to the climate crisis. They're mostly wrong, and in this paper we explain why. Instead of planting trees, we need to talk about people managing landscapes. 1/x academic.oup.com/bioscience/adv…
We highlight 10 pitfalls of tree planting, and discuss how a focus on people who manage landscapes will work. 2/x
The first pitfall is that it is ecosystems, not tree planting campaigns, that capture and store carbon. Tree planting campaigns have high failure rates, and many ecosystems with sparse tree cover store large amounts of carbon below the ground - e.g. see onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11… 3
Read 22 tweets

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