Elements of a CV

Talking with some grad students over the past few months, I’ve made some off-handed comments like “put that on your CV” or “that’ll be good for the ol’ CV.” And I was surprised to hear responses such as “Heh. I don’t have a CV” or “yeah I’ll get around to making a CV if I ever have something to put on it.” These responses are problematic for grad students, I think, because it assumes one isn’t doing “CV-worthy” work yet or that one isn’t quite “advanced” enough to have “earned” the right to have a CV. I think every academic – including the newest grad student – needs to have a CV and needs to maintain that CV regularly. This post is my attempt to explain what a CV is, why you need one, and what should be included on it.

Terminology

Who cares what the right terminology is regarding a CV. There are really boring debates on the interwebs about whether “curriculum vita” or “curriculum vitae” is the proper Latin spelling for CV. It essentially translates to “course of life,” a document that should track all that has been done relative to one’s academic career. You’ll see different spellings of CV in many venues, with even the most seasoned scholars differing on the spelling in official, published documents. It’s not worth worrying about. Just try to call it a “CV” as much as possible to avoid having to spell it. And then move on.

Purpose

A CV is intended to be a single document that can explain everything you’ve been up to in the world of academia in an organized fashion. It is different from a resume (I’m too lazy to put the accent marks on “resume”) in at least four ways:

1. CVs are exhaustive and lengthy and do not need to be confined to a page or two like resumes. The mantra of “no more than a page for a resume” makes no sense to an academic (and is making less and less sense these days to the business world), so don’t be shy about having a multi-page CV even as a grad student. Many senior scholars wind up with CVs upwards of 20-50 pages, depending on font and spacing. But who’s counting?
2. CVs generally emphasize academic accomplishments and educational feats over professional experience. In a resume, you’re trying to demonstrate that you have the work experience necessary for a given job more than the theoretical or educational training. Thus, a resume will focus on past employment and professional highlights, often relegating academic achievements (e.g., degrees earned) to a few lines at the end of the resume. CVs usually feature degrees in the first or second part of the document and push professional experience deep into the document (except for professional-track professors, who are employed as academics precisely because of their professional experience. These folks have different looking CVs).
3. CVs do not generally contain objective statements, references, or descriptions of job duties at various employers. Unless it’s absolutely necessary or it makes for an unusual story, CVs usually don’t detail the day-to-day job duties of a professional position. The position is simply listed. CVs also shouldn’t list references or people available to provide letters of recommendation, but some CVs do, especially CVs of those actively seeking employment. And, most certainly, CVs never contain objective statements like the ones seen at the top of professional resumes. Sometimes you see research statements or teaching interests and what-not, but not often.
4. Lastly, CVs exist all the time, while resumes exist only when one is actively seeking employment. Resumes are constructed in a way that sells the individual to a potential employer, and the language in the document reflects this tone. CVs, on the other hand, chronicle the work of an academic all the time, so the tone may get a bit sales-y when someone is hunting for a new academic job, but generally CVs are objective lists of one’s accomplishments. Resumes are sales pitches, and CVs are detailed records.

When to Start a CV

You should start a CV now. Even if you’re a first-year master’s student, you have enough to start a CV, albeit a modest one. You can list the degree(s) you already have (your bachelor’s degree) and the one you’re pursuing (your master’s degree) in the education section of your CV. You can list courses you’re a TA for in a teaching section. You can list papers you’re working on for presentation or publication in your research section. And so on. Even if you don’t have much to put down, and much of it is speculative and your research “in progress,” at least you’re getting in the habit of keeping a record of your work. Being responsive to a CV and regularly updating it keeps you focused as well. I heard Danielle Endres say once that any time she puts in more than three hours working on anything, she finds a way to get it on her CV, whether through publication, submitting it to her undergrad alumni newsletter, or incorporating it as a handout in her classes. This is a good mindset for time management. If you’re pouring a bunch of time into something interesting, it better be a productive use of time in the end. If you find yourself never feeling like you have enough hours in the day and you spend countless energy working on various scholarly projects, and yet you’re not building your CV in a similar pace, then you’re not focusing your energy on being productive. Also, having a skeleton CV that has a section for service with nothing in it should encourage you to seek out some service opportunities to add to that section. Make the structure of your CV an agenda for your work and you’ll end up a balanced, productive scholar come job-hunting time.

Style of a CV

There is no right or wrong style for a CV, so long as you’re internally consistent and thorough and you make the document easy to navigate and read. Pick a citation style that makes some sense for your discipline (e.g., APA or MLA would be appropriate for communication folks; I like APA) and do it correctly throughout your document. CVs are plain, on white 8.5″ x 11″ paper, without any decorations or weird fonts or colors or photos (photos are sometimes appropriate if you’re an artist or something, but in that case you’ll have a portfolio anyway).

Elements of a CV

The best way to make a CV is to find a CV or two that you like. Pick a scholar you admire and mimic their CV format. I initially created my CV in the style of Helga Shugart’s and Brian Ott’s CVs. Be consistent in the way you list your accomplishments chronologically. For instance, if you want your most recent publications to be first in the list, list everything else in your CV in reverse chronological order as well. Reverse chronological order makes the most sense to me, because, after all, when you’re a senior scholar and your latest publications are a dozen pages into your CV, it’s going to look weird. So here are some sections for your CV, with some commentary about each one:

• Top matter. The top of your CV should have your full name, as well as any nickname you go by. This name should be the same one you use in publications, so if you go by “Daren C. Brabham” in publications, make sure the “C.” is at the top of your CV too. Also at the top, you should include your contact information. Phone, office/mailing address, and email address are a must, and social media screen names, Skype names, and other new media handles are becoming common sights now too. It is a good idea to include a date to indicate when the CV was last updated. This can go in the top matter, in the header, in the footer, or at the end of the CV entirely. I think it’s best to have this date visible somewhere on the first page for the benefit of the reader. Don’t include personal information, such as marital status, race, a photo, nationality, birthdate, gender, and so on. This is generally not acceptable in the U.S. (though it is more common in Europe and elsewhere). This is especially true if you’re follwing a style guide (e.g., APA) that is strict about gender neutrality, having research stand on its own merits, etc.
• Academic positions (optional). This section is often first for scholars who are beyond grad school and have some positions to actually list here. Fully tenured folks, deans, department chairs, and those professors with affiliations to various labs and groups generally have enough to include in this section. Each line in this section should include the position (e.g., Assistant Professor), the department, the university, and the dates served, and each line should be consistent in style. If it’s a current position, put somethig like “2006-present” or “2008 – ” to indicate that you’re currently serving in this role.
• Education section (a must). The education section should list all degrees earned and should list any degree currently being pursued. The name of the degree (e.g., “M.A.”), the subject or department, the university, and the dates should be listed. If a degree is currently being pursued, you should be sure to indicate that the degree has not actually been earned yet by listing “in progress” or “expected 2011″ or some other text. Not including this information is misleading and inflates your CV. Because Ph.D. students have various stages and a long process of “done” to account for, notes about defense dates, thesis approval dates, and formal graduation dates should be listed when appropriate. If you had some kind of advisor or supervisory committee during your degree, you should list as least the chair or primary advisor’s name (and, in my opinion, everyone else too). If you wrote a thesis or dissertation, the title of it should be included too. A note about GPAs: Don’t include your GPA for a given degree, even if it was a 4.0. This is tacky, and, ironically, it’s a bit meaningless in the academic world. A GPA might have mattered in your bachelor’s work, but it doesn’t usually matter in the master’s or doctoral degrees. The first reason is that these degree programs have pretty inflated grades anyway. In my Ph.D. program, for instance, you were in danger of being booted out of the program if you made Bs, which means that anyone who completed the program had a really high GPA. Second, master’s and Ph.D. programs often have thesis hours included on transcripts as well, and, essentially, if you successfully defend the thesis, you wind up with a bunch of As for these many thesis hours, further inflating the GPA. And third, performance in class assignments has little bearing on one’s success as an academic. I ended up publishing most of the papers I wrote in the classes I got the lowest grades in, and these publications mattered a lot more than the added boost of the grade on my GPA. And, frankly, seeing someone list their GPAs feels like they’re boasting a bit, and for someone who has never had a perfect GPA since high school, I don’t care to know anyone else’s GPA. But if you want to show off your success in an academic program, you can do at least two things: 1) win some kind of award for your hard work. Nothing says “awesome master’s student” quite like a “top master’s thesis” award or “best grad student” award. Or, 2) list the relevant academic honor that accompanied your high GPA. At most schools, having a really high GPA probably means you graduated cum laude, magna cum laude, summa cum laude, or you were part of some really prestigious honor society or part of a high dean’s list. You can certainly indicate these things in the education section (and/or in the honors and awards section) of your CV, like this: “B.A. summa cum laude” or “B.S. (Phi Beta Kappa)” or “M.A., valedictorian.” But just don’t put your GPA on your CV. Also, don’t put anything about your high school on your CV.
• Research section (a must). If you’re gunning for a research-oriented academic job, or if you’ve got more stuff relating to research to be proud of, then the research section should come next in the CV. Otherwise, the teaching section comes next. The research section should be subdivided in a clear, logical fashion according to publications, presentations, grants, and works in progress. How this happens is entirely up to you, but try to emphasize the stuff that’s more important first (e.g., books are generally more important than journal articles, and all publications are generally more important than presentations). These should be listed as citations according to the style guide of your choice and should essentially look like a bibliography of your work. Items should be as complete as possible, including dates, volume/issue numbers, and, if possible, links to the works online. If your published work starts to become a mix of peer reviewed and invited work, you should indicate that somehow as well, either with asterisks and notes or by separating peer reviewed from invited work in the structure of the research section. Depending on the style guide, your “in progress” or “submitted for review” work may end up looking like completed, published papers. This is the case with APA style. Be careful with this, and always lean toward disclosing the truth about a paper (e.g., that it hasn’t been published anywhere yet or that it hasn’t even been fully written yet) rather than lean toward making the paper look like it’s already in print. Lastly, if a paper is under blind review at a journal or a conference, don’t list that your paper is under review at a particular journal on your CV. This defeats the purpose. You can always tell your tenure committee privately where your work is under review at, but don’t make this public if the process is supposed to be blind reviewed. Finally, be ethical when it comes to listing a co-authored publication. I frequently see folks list a publication, and then at the end of the citation, in parentheses, they will put “with John Doe and Sally Jones” as a way to indicate co-authorship. This is misleading, I think, and a better way is to put “first author, with John Doe and Sally Jones” so as to indicate exactly what order the authors appeared in the official publication. Author order matters a lot to folks in the social sciences. “Jones, Smith, and Brown” is a lot better for Jones than it is for Smith and Brown, and solo-authored work matters even more to some people. And, if it was “Jones, Smith, Brown, White, and Stevens,” then “Jones et al.” becomes the citation throughout most of the manuscript. This seems petty, but the honest way to list a co-authored work in a CV is to list the order of authors upfront in the citation.
• Teaching section (a must). The teaching section should indicate the courses you’ve taught on your own, the courses you’ve been a teaching assistant for, and any guest lectures you’ve given. Be specific about these entries and be honest – if you were a TA, then you didn’t actually “teach” the course on your own, no matter how absent your supervising teacher was. Specific instances of guest lecturing are important to note, but when you start amassing a lot of teaching experience or start giving a bunch of guest lectures, it may be a bit too exhaustive to detail every instance in your CV.
• Service (a must). Teaching, research, and service are the three pillars of academic work, so make sure you include service along with teaching and research sections. Subdivide your service section in a way that makes sense. Some tenure committees will want to see a distinction between service to a professional association, service to the university, and service at the department level. Contributions to media, through interviews or guest appearances, are also considered public scholarship in the service vein, so list these occurences. The point of service is that you should make it clear that your role as a lonely, independent scholar isn’t actually so cloistered. Academics are supposed to give back to the community and to the institutions they operate within. That said, don’t get too carried away with service. If you’re devoting too much time to too many committees and causes, it may get in the way of teaching and research. Though it shouldn’t be this way, service is often seen as the third most important thing of the three pillars, so make sure it doesn’t impede in your other work.
• Professional experience section (optional). If your professional experience is relevant to your academic work (e.g., you are a former marketing professional now working as a communication professor), then it is importat to include this information in your CV somewhere, albeit briefly. It may also be important to include professional experience if it relates to your research or teaching interests in some interesting way (e.g., you’re a former zookeeper and your research now concerns the ethics of zoos). Use judgment here, but generally you don’t want to include every little job you had through college to pay the bills, even if you did pour a lot of sweat and tears into your bartending gig.
• Honors and awards section (optional, but encouraged). If you have some relevant honors and awards you want people to know about, these should go in your CV. If you don’t have Pulitzers, Nobels, honorary doctorates, and other really really high awards, you should consider putting your awards section toward the end of your CV. But by all means if you do have a Nobel Prize, put your awards section a little higher up in your CV. I’ve heard competing views on the awards issue. Nearly everyone agrees that you should only list awards relevant to academia (and in some cases really high public service accomplishments), not mundane awards from your professional career or church activities. But people differ in terms of how far back to reach with awards and whether or not scholarships (even undergrad ones) are important enough to list. For instance, if you won some really high award as an undergraduate, do you list it on your CV? And, it may make sense to list a prestigious graduate scholarship or fellowship in your awards section, but do you list undergraduate scholarships too? In my opinion all important sources of funding deserve attention, even if it is weird. I list my undergrad scholarships because they were actually very important for me being able to attend the college I did. And I list an award from my undergrad days because it was a really high honor at Trinity, given once a year to one person in the whole school for leadership. So I guess it’s about judgment. At some point it may make sense for me to drop some of the “less important” things in the past off of my CV, but hopefully that’ll mean I’ve added a bunch of new “more important” stuff to the document since then.
• Affiliations (a must). Usually one’s professional affiliations conclude a CV, and I think this is important to list. People want to know what professional/academic associations you belong to, and it’s good to belong to at least one. This also gives readers a sense of where your interdisciplinary interests lie. A journalism professor who is a member of a political science association or a computer science association is intriguing, more intriguing perhaps than a journalism professor who only belonged to communication societies.

There are other sections to add to a CV as they begin to make sense and occupy a significant portion of your time, but the three pillars (teaching, research, service), as well as education, make up the crucial foundations of a good CV.

CVs take a while to write, so it’s best to get one going and to maintain it regularly than to scramble to write one from scratch when someone asks for it out of the blue. Plus, checking in regularly on your CV makes it glaringly obvious that a project in your “in progress” section of your CV isn’t progressing, which should make you reassess your priorities or abandon the project entirely. I’ve abandoned many projects that lingered on my CV too long as “in progress,” and I’ve remembered to wrap up some projects from having to see them in the “in progress” queue too long. CVs can be effective time management documents if you approach them with that mentality.

I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts on this.