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<p>Well that is the million dollar question, and if you find the answer, let me know, will you? ;)</p>
<p>Really it is about a variety of things. Typically they say that tenure-track faculty are expected to perform in three main areas: research, teaching, and service. How a given school values each of them varies, but most major programs at research universities value research above all and the other two are secondary (though not necessarily unimportant).</p>
<p>So for starters, you need to perform high caliber research, which generally means you need to have at least a few journal articles in peer-reviewed journals already (or on the cusp of being published) and you need to otherwise show promise that you will keep up that type of research production, which means that reference letters are quite important. Who writes those reference letters (how well-known they are) and what they say can mean a lot in terms of whether you get an interview or not. Conference papers are nice, but they generally don’t carry much weight here and are primarily valuable for networking and getting your name out there a bit.</p>
<p>For teaching, it is a good idea to try and get some teaching experience in graduate school and/or as a post-doc, and the more you have the better (so long as it doesn’t interfere with research). For most graduate students, this means being a TA for classes. Some are lucky* enough to actually teach a class or two as the instructor of record. Hiring committees like to see that you have experience here and like to see you use it to reflect on your teaching style and philosophy.</p>
<p>Service generally means serving on university committees (e.g. faculty search), educational outreach and serving various positions for professional societies (e.g. conference organizer, session chair) and journals (e.g. reviewer, editor). There aren’t a whole lot of these opportunities as a graduate student or post-doc but there are some.</p>
<p>Anyway, those are the three main areas that you need to hit as a prospective faculty member. How to best go about that and then best present that to a hiring committee is another story entirely, and since I haven’t actually gone through that process yet, let alone succeeded in it, I can’t really help you there. For that, try browsing through the articles and message boards at the Chronicle of Higher Education.</p>
<p>*Depending on your point of view, this might constitute either good or bad luck.</p>