Whether you are a grad student or junior faculty member, it is important to keep your grants and job searches organized. The deadlines are always different and have a tendency to creep up on you. Some people keep paper files and folders, but I am entirely electronic. I have a folder on my computer called "Jobs and Grants." Whenever I see a job posting, post-doc, or grant that I am interested in, I save as text a copy of the posting as a text file or PDF into a subfolder.
Inside the subfolders, I have a copy of the posting (either the original text or HTML; paper postings I actually scan as TIFF files); the cover letter; application forms; the CV copy I'm using; etc.
The name of the subfolders are prefixed by the date that the proposal is due. So my job/grants folder looks like this:
- Jobs and Grants
- 2004.10.01-DisneyCastMember
- 2004.10.01-HarvardFAS
- 2005.01.25-Yale-CEAS
This way, if I sort by name inside the main folder, the subfolders get sorted by due date.
Many grants come up around the same time each year, so even if you don't apply this year, you might create a dummy folder for next year (2006.10.01-BigGrant) to remind yourself to apply for it.
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I use Tasks to keep track of due dates for to-do items and the Scrapbook plugin for Firefox to store copies of the original announcements. Both solutions work on any computer OS, but Tasks works nicely with iCalendar for OS X as well.
Hi Karen,
I LOVE your website! I have also been keeping track of my job applications via electronic folders -- but I really like the idea of using numerical dates for easy sorting within the folders! Good tip! Ahmed