Your Career

What to consider as you draft the most important element of your faculty-job application

Drafting a curriculum vitae can be a bit of a reckoning. The CV is essentially a running list of your accomplishments, and as you edit it, you see clearly what you’ve done — and what you haven’t. Your goal is to organize the document such that your accomplishments leap off the page and need no interpretation. Unlike a résumé or a cover letter, a vitae is intended to be comprehensive, in that you are expected to list everything you’ve done as a doctoral student and beyond. Every CV is unique, because everyone has a different path through graduate school. But here are some basics to get you started:

• Design. Keep the format simple (don’t overload it with tables), your font standard (avoid Gothic, Script, or the infamous Comic Sans), and your margins of typical size (one inch). Your vitae is a document that will grow in length. Set it up so that it’s easy for you to add entries without having to fiddle around with the formatting every time.
• Length. There’s no reason to agonize over the length of your CV, as you might for an industry résumé. But neither should you pad it with incidental entries just to make it longer — that risks burying your achievements beneath layers of fluff.
• Education. For new Ph.D.s and A.B.D.s, this should be the first section on your CV. (Most everyone else should start with a version of your experience section.) List your degrees in reverse chronological order (starting with the most recent). For your doctoral degree, include the name of your adviser and the title of your dissertation.

Continue reading: “Dos and Don’ts of Creating Your CV,” by Jennifer S. Furlong and Stacy M. Hartman

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What we’re reading

Here’s more on career issues and trends from around the web. See something we should include? Let me know.

• A report in The Wall Street Journal argues that AI is already beginning to threaten white-collar jobs, and “few industries are immune.”
• In Roxane Gay’s latest Work Friend column in The New York Times, she gives her take on how to answer job-interview questions about diversity and inclusion.
• “People probably like you more than you think,” according to advice in the Harvard Business Review on managing your career.