Application Information
NextGen Professors: Call for Applications
NextGen Professors is a career-development program focused on preparing Cornell graduate students and postdocs for faculty careers across institutional types. The primary audience for this program is doctoral students (in year three or beyond) and postdocs with a demonstrated commitment to advancing access to higher education and supporting inclusive learning, mentoring, and research environments. Participants are members of a cohort who, together, engage in a series of professional and career development activities, including monthly NextGen Professors cohort meetings and Power Mentoring Sessions with faculty. Participants also engage in program offerings of Future Faculty and Academic Careers, which focus on effectively integrating research and teaching skills for career development.
Important Dates
2025-2026 Application Cycle
- Application opens: August 11 (Application form)
- Application package priority due date: September 18, 2025 (by 11:59 pm ET)
- Decisions released in October 2025
Eligibility Criteria
Doctoral students and postdocs with a demonstrated commitment to to advancing access to higher education and supporting inclusive learning, mentoring, and research environments. Doctoral students applying to the program should be in Year 3 of their doctoral studies or beyond. Priority consideration will be provided to advanced doctoral candidates and postdocs preparing for the academic job market.
Application Instructions
To apply, please fill out the NextGen Professors Application, within which you will be prompted to upload the following documents. Follow the links below for our recommended resources on developing these mini statements.
- Curriculum Vitae (CV)
- Teaching Mini Statement (roughly 500 words or less)
- Research Mini Statement (roughly 500 words or less)
- Mentoring and Advising Mini Statement (roughly 500 words or less). You may also wish to see the Cornell FAIM project website for more background on inclusive mentorship principles. Based on your career goals, you may choose to focus more on research mentoring, or on advising students in general.
Note: We appreciate that the task of preparing these documents could feel daunting for future faculty who have not yet begun to develop such statements. However, draft statements should be reflective based on your experiences thus far and should also consider what you hope to accomplish in the near future as you prepare for the academic job market. These documents will serve as baseline products that NextGen Professors will build upon and refine over the course of the year through their participation in this program. Because we would like to see your own thought processes and drafts in order to help refine them, we will ask about your usage of generative AI.
Apply
The application period for 2025-2026 is now open. (Application form)
Sponsorship
This initiative is co-sponsored by the Graduate School Office of Inclusion & Student Engagement and the Future Faculty and Academic Careers program in the Graduate School Office of Career and Professional Development. It is the institutionalization of efforts launched with support from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1647094 (CIRTL AGEP). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Contact
Please contact Graduate School Associate Dean for Inclusion & Student & Faculty Engagement Sara Xayarath Hernández (sh267@cornell.edu) or Associate Dean for Professional Development Colleen McLinn (cmm252@cornell.edu) with questions about this opportunity.