Need help writing a CV

[Morbis Meh]

Hello eveyone!

I am currently in the stages of applying for grad school (at the moment trying to find an advisor) and one of the prospectives advisors requested me to send my CV to him. I have yet to make one and am slightly a little nervous (with only having a bachelor's degree I know I won't have a lot on it per se).

So I ask the collective minds of the playground to aid me if they can, I know I can search online for a guide but I would prefer getting help from people who have written one.

What I would like: what should include on it, tips for making look attractive, general formatting, pit falls to avoid etc etc.

Thank you for your time!

[Haruki-kun]

(I'm assuming this is happening in America. If it is not, some people might have specific tips depending on your country.)

Have you ever had a job? Even if it's not in your field, if you've waited tables or worked at Wal-mart, write that in. Work ethic, people skills, responsibility, enthusiasm are all skills that translate into other jobs regardless of what you were working in. If you have any sort of professional experience, write it in.

If you've had more than one job, write the most recent one first. People tend to write chronologically, but this often results in a list of high school jobs that ends with a field-related job being buried at the end of the list. Same way with education: write your most recent school (degree) first.

The only situation I can think of where you'd want to do things on any other order is if you've had a job or internship in a particular position that you'd like them to see first. (If you did an internship at a big company over the summer and then went back to school where you got a job at Subway, you'll want to list the internship first.)

Write out your skills: Are you fluent/proficient/able to communicate in another language? Are you familiar with certain software packages? Can you code a website? Do you have a deep and functional understanding of medicine/law/literature/politics/science? Write that in, too! Make sure the skills that they will be most interested in are written on the top, but don't include ONLY skills you think they'll be interested in: Who knows? Maybe they could find use for someone who has an encyclopedic knowledge of French wines.

[valadil]

What I would like: what should include on it, tips for making look attractive, general formatting, pit falls to avoid etc etc.


So this applies to resumes more than CVs, but I think it's still useful.

Writing the resume and formatting it are two separate tasks. Yes, you want the thing to be pretty. You want a certain number of lines per item so that none of them appear sparse. You want the whole thing fitting on one page.

But doing that while you're writing it will sabotage your writing.

The way I fixed my resume was to write it first. I wrote out each job I ever had and my responsibilities at those jobs. Another day I went back and made the whole thing look like I knew how to use MS Word. Big improvement.

One other piece of advise when you do things this way is you can treat the resume as a template. In each job put in all the responsibilities you had, not just the most important ones. Yes, your resume will be longer than you want, but that's okay. "Most important" is relative. Now when you send out a resume, spend 5 minutes cutting items. The things you leave should be specific to the job you're applying to. Doing it this way is IMO easier than adding specific items at the last minute.