CV Template

Name
Address • City, State (if in US) • ZIP or country code • Country (if not in US)
Phone • Email address
Website (if you have one for professional reasons)
Your LinkedIn profile (customized URL)^{[1, 2]}

Last Name CV month/year

Notes

1. The CV is usually part of a package that includes the CV itself, a research statement of interest or philosophy, a publications list, and references. The pubs list can also be included in the CV, which is usually the case with academic jobs.
2. The organization of the CV— what sections go where—will change as you advance in your career and apply for positions that focus on different areas. For example, a CV for a teaching job should have a different emphasis than a CV for a research-intensive position.
3. This serves as a “headline” to communicate your research areas of expertise, as well as subfields and scientific-problem-solving techniques. It should match the job description as much as possible (if you are applying for a job), so it can be customized so that certain words or phrases are listed first depending on the stated requirements of the employer.
4. List skills that you have that are also referenced in the job ad or in your discussions with the organization. You can list them like they are here or separate them out in terms of science/technical, business, computing, and language skills.
   Note: For professor and even postdoc positions, skills often are listed much later in the CV.
5. Note how to qualify your levels of language abilities. Using native or near-native does not mean you necessarily come from a region where that language is spoken. Rather, it denotes a level of fluency that is equivalent to a native or near-native speaker. If you prefer, you could qualify your level of proficiency with the following: advanced, intermediate, and beginner. You also can go a step further and state your fluency level in terms of speaking, writing, and reading.
6. If you are applying for a nonacademic job, the title of your thesis may not be as important as the subdisciplines that you gained expertise in. So rather than writing out the thesis title, you could write keywords, such as biophysics, biochemistry, or x-ray spectroscopy.
7. List all your formal academic appointments, including grad student research assistantships, teaching assistantships, postdoc appointments, and any formal visiting positions.
8. You can also write it as “Associate Professor of Physics, The University of Z, ….
9. Give the location of the university/institute if it might not be well known.
10. You can also include short-term projects, fellowships, and internships.
11. Your experiences are the jobs, volunteer positions, and project assignments that give evidence of your skill development and problem solving. For titles, you can use Postdoctoral Associate, Research Assistant, Research Fellow, and the like.
12. Use this as a template. Include the micro-problems you solved on a day-to-day, week-to-week, or month-to-month basis in terms of the following: micro-problem, solution, and result. Quantify the result as much as possible. A micro-problem is essentially an accomplishment that you had at your job. It is a problem you solved on a day-to-day or longer basis.
13. This section can be organized in a number of different ways. You can start with a summary, as seen here. It is helpful to start with a summary of the different tasks you had as a teacher, especially if you did the same set of tasks for multiple teaching assignments.
14. You can list out your specific TA assignments.
15. You can add the number of students in the class, which is relevant in academia for two kinds of jobs: a position at a research-based university where part of your time will be spent teaching, and a position at a primarily undergraduate institution or at an organization where you will spend much of your time teaching rather than conducting research.
16. When a course name does not make clear what it was you taught, include the subjects covered.
17. For awards that need to be clarified in terms of their significance, add a phrase in parentheses after the award name, such as the following: (given to only 2% of the student population every year in recognition of an outstanding chemistry research project).
18. Include fellowships and other honors. You do not need to list honors or awards from high school. Also, do not use acronyms unless you have spelled them out earlier in the CV.
19. For academic jobs, it is important to demonstrate that you have experience raising money. List here any grants you received, any grants you cowrote or wrote, the funding agency, what the proposal was for (title), and the amount. You can bold the grants for which you were the PI. You can include grants that seem small, like a $500 travel grant to attend a conference or $1000 to organize a symposium on your campus. It is fine if it is cross-listed in the awards section, especially for prestigious opportunities, such as fellowships where you have to propose a project.
20. These are just a few examples of items that constitute Service or Leadership
21. You can add some specificity to any of the positions to demonstrate certain skills, such as fundraising, event management, or project management.
22. Outreach can be a separate section from Service or included in it. You can list your mentoring activities, outreach events, volunteer community outreach projects (both in STEM and non-STEM disciplines), and the like.
23. Usually if you are applying for a job outside academia that is NOT a research job, you do not have to list your specific papers, except if they are exceptional. Got a first-author paper in Science? That’s something to list and draw attention to. If you are one of the authors on the paper about the Higgs discovery, despite there being tons of authors, it would be something significant to trumpet as well. Instead, you can summarize your publication record.
24. Bold your name in the list of authors so I can easily see what author you are
25. Bold your name so the reader can see where in the list of authors you are.
26. Bold your name so the reader can see where in the list of authors you are.
27. Bold your name so the reader can see where in the list of authors you are.
28. You should qualify which talks were invited ones and which were posters.
29. You can include talks that were for nonscientific audiences or that fall under Outreach here, or you can have a separate section devoted to nontechnical talks. Either way, it is important to demonstrate that you have experience communicating your scientific expertise to many different audiences.
30. This will depend on your discipline. For astronomers, for example, time spent on observing runs is an important element of your CV, so you would list it here.

CV Template by Alaina G. Levine, Quantum Success Solutions, www.alainalevine.com.

Download this template as a Microsoft Word document.