It's a website! Home

CVs and Resumes

I am often giving advice to students about their application materials. Here are some general tips. They are nothing special to math, or to academia.

1. Consider your audience.
2. Be brief, be specific.
3. Avoid cliches. Bend the rules.

Disclaimer: Most of what I write below is focused on summer research internships and (semi-)permanent academic jobs. Some of the advice probably carries over to jobs at national labs, government, or the private sector, but I haven't had enough conversations with people in those spheres to know for sure.

1. Consider your audience.

I can speak to the person looking at your materials in academia:

• Tenure/Tenure-track professor. Depending on the level, an advanced postdoc may also be reading and giving input.
• They are likely short on time and have too many applications to look at.
• They might have had bias training (or similar). But this depends on the university, state, and country.
• Despite bias training, there are still (debatably) less nefarious biases we all have, such as, "do I recognize a collaborator/activity/workshop/reputable mentorship program/university this person is associated with?"
• Even if it is their first time looking at applications, and they are coming in with the best intentions, they will very quickly train themselves to look for what they consider vital information and tune out everything else.

2. Be brief, be specific.

Much of this item is related to the "overworked professor" trope, and its natural conclusion: they will train themselves to skim past anything that looks like fluff or filler. Even if the reader isn't overworked, being able to communicate your expertise concisely and effectively is a large part of what makes you an impressive candidate. I would suggest no more than two sentences on any one item.

3. Avoid cliches. Bend the rules.

You need to stand out. If it feels like you're putting in verbiage, sections, etc, that feel pointless, ask yourself why (here, avoiding cliches aligns with being brief). If you are still building your confidence, and not sure if you are deleting something vital, ask a mentor.

In bending the rules, know that unless an application says something like, "you may not include images" or "up to 2 pages" or "up to 2MB," be brave in expressing yourself in your CV! Even moreso for your other application materials! For example...

• Why not throw out the template entirely and format it yourself (if you have other things you want to procrastinate on, even better!)
• If you're an artist, why not border your CV with hand-drawn art? Vines and flowers? Sweet mathematical nothings?
• Why not include images of yourself; presenting, doing outreach events, etc?
• What about reordering sections and "cutting to the chase" if the position you're applying to is clearly seeking a very specific skillset?

Of course, know that in making personal or artistic choices, not everyone may receive it positively (or neutrally). You may have a grouch on the hiring committee, but you can't know this in advance. The decisions are up to you.

Specific recommendations.

Finally, I'll give some more specific recommendations. Know that they're based on the principles above. Most of them aren't controversial.

• Ordering. Chronological events are all in reverse chronological order (most recent things first).
• Ordering, part 2. Typically an "Education" comes first (if you have a thesis, include the title and advisor's name). Then, what follows depends on the type of academic job. You can play with the details for as long as you want, but it generally boils down to
  Research related → Teaching/mentoring related → Misc
  if it is a research internship or job at an R1 university (see US map — generally, universities granting PhDs) or
  Teaching/mentoring related → Research related → Misc
  if it is a Primarily Undergraduate Institution, private liberal arts college, etc., where your main expectation is either to some mix of teaching and mentorship of non-PhDs.
• Proving you know your stuff. You have mixed objectives here. On the one hand, you should be brief (remember: overworked professor). On the other hand, you need to convince them you know what you are doing (remember: be specific).

  Hence, for your major projects, whatever they are, a happy balance is to name-drop a subject area (e.g. "analytic number theory" or "control theory" or "fluid mechanics" or "inclusive teaching in math") and follow with your best effort at a one or two-sentence description of the project, as if you are explaining it to someone with only an undergraduate degree in mathematics. If you are struggling to do this, it's worth thinking about why. (Maybe I'm showing my applied math bias here.)

  If you are still forward-looking (meaning you don't have any projects yet), you should try to approach every new class/research project from this perspective. What are you doing? How would you describe this project to someone else? Can you produce any visible "deliverables" (forgiving business-speak), such as an image, diagram, or table illustrating the motivation or conclusions? A github repository? A website?

• More on being specific. Those applying for academic or teaching jobs for the first time may be following advice or templates for resumes. Pieces of this may include a "Career objectives" at the top; flowery adjectives describing qualities of former jobs ("leadership role," "punctual," "hard worker," etc). More generally, students early in their career want to list their non-academic jobs (likely for a few reasons). I'll address these out of order.

  On the topic of non-academic jobs, broadly: mostly, you'll have a hard time convincing an academic reader why these are relevant. Exceptions aside, you'll mostly be able to say that you could hold a job while succeeding academically. That's impressive! Not everyone can say that, and it does reflect positively on you. But you don't need to list all the jobs you've held since age 16 unless they have specific relevance to the job.

  I might bruise some egos here, but: drop all generic adjectives, unless you can follow up the adjective with specific information about how it would be relevant for an academic job. For instance, if your job might involve being a course coordinator, it could be valuable for you to describe non-academic experience in managing 10+ people. But, adjectives like "punctual" or "hard-worker" are things that people will moreso infer from your proven record (recommendations, courses, activities, publications) than how you self-describe on the resume.

  On the topic of "career objectives:" this isn't typically seen in academic CVs; if they need to know your goals/motivations align with theirs, they'll either infer it from the rest of your application, and/or during an interview.

• Miscellaneous. Put down your skills or activities here that don't fit cleanly into any other section. While this section generally comes last, sometimes things you know or have done in passing are more valuable to the position than most of your prior work. Maybe you have experience with Python, or high performance computing, and a computationally oriented person will find it notable that someone can "get going" without the month or two it takes to familiarize oneself with these tools. Maybe you are fluent in Spanish and the reader has signinficant collaborations in Spanish-speaking countries. Maybe you have significant experience in K12 outreach and the department is seeking to expand in this direction even though it's not listed in the job listing.

  General point being, if it's something that you've spent 10+ hours on (arbitrarily chosen number), consider mentioning it briefly.