Guide to CVs

By: Skylar Grayson, Brandon Pries, Bill Smith, Anavi Uppal, and Maria Vincent

Contents

I. What is a CV?

A CV (or curriculum vitae, although you will never hear anyone say those words out loud) provides a summary of experiences, accomplishments, and skills, and is often the first place committees look when considering a graduate school or job application in academia. Here, we describe how to start putting together a CV and outline the common elements of a CV, focusing on what an undergraduate should include when applying to graduate school (although it is generally applicable to all stages of an academic career).

The Difference Between a CV and a Résumé

As an undergraduate, you may be more familiar with the term résumé. Though a CV and a résumé are documents that serve a similar purpose, they differ in the details. A CV is more comprehensive and focuses on a record of academic accomplishments. A résumé is more skills- and qualifications-focused. Résumés are often limited in length, being just a page or two. CVs can be much longer as they provide an exhaustive list of accomplishments. (I know of an accomplished professor in his 60s who adds every single first- and co-author publication to his CV—it’s over a hundred pages long.) These differences arise from the differences between industry and academia: in industry, a résumé demonstrates that you can briefly explain how your skills and experiences qualify you for the role a business is looking to fill, while in academia, a CV demonstrates that you have a history of being a successful academic. In academic career paths and graduate school applications, you will almost always be asked to submit a CV instead of a résumé, so it’s a good idea to have one prepared.

An Aside on CV Usage in Other Contexts

The term CV can be used outside academia in some regions (e.g., Europe), and in those cases, it may refer to a different kind of document. For example, a CV in European industries refers to a document very similar to a résumé in American industries, but may include other information that is not typical in American résumés such as a headshot and marital status. For this guide, we will be focusing on the academic CV.

II. Where and How to Get Started

The fact that you’re reading this is a great start already! In short, a CV is just a well-curated list of your academic accomplishments and history, so starting with a list (following the guidelines we’ll share below) can be a great place to start.

Looking at Other CVs

If you’re looking for inspiration, you can absolutely look at the CVs of others to get a sense of what they put in their CVs and how their CVs are formatted. While you can find example CVs online (e.g., here, here, here, and here), the CVs of other people in your field and of people at roughly the same career stage as you are probably the most helpful. Ask around your department or check the websites of your professors to find some that are related to your career path! Keep in mind that your CV will likely look much different than those of your professors—they have been around much longer than you have, so their CVs will be much longer than yours and will likely contain sections that yours won’t. That’s totally OK and don’t let it discourage you! Just keep in mind that the things you highlight on your CV will likely need to be different than the things a professor highlights on theirs.

A Note on Software

To make a CV, you’ll need some sort of text-editing software. Common choices include Microsoft Word and Google Docs (and LibreOffice, a free alternative) since they are fairly user-friendly and most people are already familiar with them. LaTeX (often used through Overleaf, its online interface) is more powerful since it grants you more control over formatting and placement, but there is a bit of a learning curve. LaTeX/Overleaf is also the standard for preparing academic publications, so exploring it now can be useful later. Overleaf also has nice CV templates/examples available that you can modify to fit your needs, which is super helpful!

III. The Common Elements of a CV

Here are the typical elements in a CV. What we call “the essentials” are items we expect most undergraduate students will have; “the extras” are things that not all undergrads may have (yet), but things that are useful to include if you have them; and “the future additions” describe some of the elements you’ll see in CVs of more senior academics, from graduate students to postdocs to faculty. Please note that this is not intended to be a comprehensive list, and you may have some flexibility to redefine or restructure some of these based on how you want to organize the content in your CV (see the “Final Thoughts” section at the end).

The Essentials

Here are the elements that should be included in just about every undergraduate CV. We present them in the typical order you will find them in a CV.

Contact Information

People need to know who you are and how to contact you! At the top of your CV, you should include (at the very least) your name and an email where people can reach you. Most people use an institutional email for this. It’s also recommended to include a phone number and an address. (You can use a work address for this, like the address of your school or department.) This space is also a great location to link any relevant profiles that you have, such as LinkedIn, Google Scholar, ORCID, Astrophysics Data System (ADS), GitHub, and so on. If you have a personal website (unlikely for most undergrads, but something you might develop as you progress in your academic career), this is also a good place for it.

Education

This section describes your educational qualifications. Let’s start with your university qualifications. As an undergrad, you should list what university you’re attending, where the university is located, and the start and end dates of your enrollment. If you’re still enrolled, you can list “Present”, “Ongoing”, or something similar for the end date (this applies to many other sections as well). If you’ve been enrolled at multiple universities, list the universities in reverse chronological order of when you attended them (that is, most recent first) and provide this information for each. With each university, you should list what degree(s) you’re working toward and when you earned the degree. As an undergrad, you can list when you expect to earn the degree—for example, something like “Expected Spring 2026” if you plan to graduate at the end of the Spring 2026 semester.

It’s often common for people to list their GPA here. It’s not required, but it could be useful if you want to highlight a high GPA. (If you’re unsure whether you should include your GPA, ask your advisor! Different people have different rules of thumb for this.) Other things that people may list here might include being part of your university’s honors college or honors program, as well as an undergraduate thesis if you are completing one.

One common question for undergraduate CVs is whether or not to include information related to high school. The general rule of thumb that I’ve heard is that it shouldn’t be included if you are at least two years beyond high school (i.e., if you’ve completed the equivalent of the sophomore year of an undergraduate degree). Again, this is a guideline and not a hard rule—significant academic achievements from high school could still be relevant as an undergraduate depending on what your circumstances are and what you’re using your CV for (such as applying to a Research Experience for Undergraduates, or REU, for example). If you have any doubts, contact your advisor or your university’s career services organization if it has one.

Research and/or Work Experience

Here is where you’ll describe your research and/or relevant work experience, particularly if you don’t have any previous research experience. If you do have both, you might have a separate section for each.

For your research experience, you should include which research groups or labs you worked in, along with the dates you worked with that group. There’s a lot of variety in how research experience can be presented and organized on a CV. As a start, you might want to list which project(s) you worked on while with a particular group and the main tasks you completed or results you produced from that project.

Your work experience will likely be much more varied in scope. For this, it may be best to highlight your “transferable skills”—skills that you can apply in multiple different contexts, such as collaboration, written or verbal communication, presenting, public speaking, and so on. If you’re intending to use your CV to apply to graduate school, you’ll want to be clear about how these roles have helped you develop skills that will allow you to succeed as a graduate student.

Extracurricular Involvement

Many people conduct relevant and valuable work that doesn’t fall into the other categories presented here, so they will add more personalized sections covering these extracurricular activities. These can include outreach, involvement in student organizations, sports, science communication, journalism, volunteer work, community service, or anything else that you are proud of and showcases your involvement in other facets of science or education. If you took any officer or leadership roles, you can list that here as well. Given the breadth of potential topics, this section can look very different for everyone, and some people might not even include it. In general, extracurricular involvement should serve to highlight that you have a life outside the classroom and that you have found some way of engaging with your university or local community.

The Extras

Here are some additional elements that you can add to your CV if you have them. We present these items in alphabetical order.

Awards, Honors, and Scholarships

Anything along the lines of an award, honor, or scholarship is something you should include if you have it! This demonstrates recognition for your success in a particular topic, subject, role, or experience. If you received something like an award or honor, you should list its name, who you received it from, and the date that you received it. If it was something like a scholarship that lasted for a duration, you should list when you were funded by that scholarship. You can also list the award amount if there was a financial component to it and you feel comfortable disclosing the amount.

Leadership Experience

Leadership experiences in any capacity are a great thing to showcase on your CV! These experiences show that you can be a leader, with the ability to manage and delegate to others, as well as work as part of a team. This can be in its own section, or it can also just be incorporated into other sections of your CV, such as the “Extracurricular Involvement” section we suggested above.

Professional Societies

If you’re a member of an honor society or a professional society, this section can list which ones you are a member of and how long you’ve been a member of each. If you’ve taken on any roles or participated in any activities related to this honor or professional society, it would be a good idea to list those here as well.

Research Products: Posters, Presentations, and Publications

Any kind of research product—whether it be a poster, presentation, or publication—shows that you can perform research, deliver results from it, and communicate those results to others. Depending on how many you have, you might be able to collect these in a single section; as you advance in your career, these can often be split into multiple sections, such as “First Author Publications”, “Co-Authored Talks”, “Invited Talks”, etc. We highly recommend adding links to these products if you have them so that other people can find your work!

Skills and Certifications

This is a section for you to outline both your technical and soft skills. Typically, you want to organize this in a series of bullet points, and some common fields covered are: programming languages, software, operating systems, and soft/transferable skills. This is also a place where you can list formal certifications if you have them.

Teaching Experience

Teaching experiences, including teaching assistantships and tutoring positions, are also useful roles to highlight if you have them. These demonstrate your ability to explain concepts to non-experts, providing evidence of both subject knowledge and communication skills. Including this type of experience is also very important for graduate school, as you may be granted “teaching assistantships” as funding sources. Some grad programs even require a certain amount of quarters/semesters of teaching before you graduate/defend your thesis. On your CV, list what your title/position was (this might be something like “Undergraduate Teaching Assistant” or “Tutor”, for example), who your employer was, what class/course/topic you taught, and what your responsibilities for this role were.

The Future Additions

Here we describe some elements of CVs that you might be able to add as you progress through your academic career while you plan to remain in academia.

Professional Appointments

This is really just a fancy way of saying “job titles”, but this becomes important as you’ve taken on many different roles (e.g., “undergraduate research assistant”, “undergraduate teaching assistant”, “graduate research assistant”, “graduate teaching assistant”, “postdoctoral researcher”, …). This is a concise listing of what positions you held and when, listed in reverse chronological order. Something like this likely isn’t necessary for an undergraduate CV, but you’re welcome to include it if you’ve taken on enough roles to fill out this section.

Committee or Professional Service

Many more senior academics will perform some sort of service to their universities or for professional organizations like the American Astronomical Society (AAS), American Physical Society (APS), etc. This could include serving on committees, peer reviewing for journals, or reviewing grant proposals.

Grant Funding

This is often included in the CVs of faculty (and postdocs and grad students, where applicable) to demonstrate their ability to obtain funding for their work. This can be especially important if you’re planning on a career in academia, as it indicates that you’re able to successfully argue why your research is worth funding.

Research Mentorship

Research mentorship demonstrates your ability to provide guidance to someone who performs research with you, highlighting similar skills to those covered in the “Teaching Experience” section, but now specifically in the context of research. This could cover topics such as specific subject knowledge, research methodology, specific software, data analysis techniques, laboratory techniques and equipment, and so on.

Table of Contents

A table of contents can be useful as your CV lengthens. If someone is reviewing a CV and wants to look at something closer to the end, a (linkable) table of contents provides an easy way to access that information without having to scroll through pages and pages of material in the middle. A CV that’s just a few pages long doesn’t need a table of contents, meaning that you probably shouldn’t have one for an undergraduate CV, but this can be something that you consider adding as you progress in your academic career and as your CV lengthens.

IV. Final Thoughts

Here, we wrap up with some thoughts on organizing the contents of your CV, tips and tricks for formatting and describing content, and thoughts from the individual authors of this guide.

Organization

Here, we describe the general organization for the sections of your CV. In almost all cases, they should be listed in the following order:

1. Contact Information, Table of Contents
2. Education, Professional Appointments
3. All research-related sections (Research Experience, Research Products, etc.)
4. Teaching Experience
5. Everything else

Note that there may be some flexibility in this. For example, sections on Honors and Awards and Grant Funding might reasonably be placed higher; or, if you’re applying for a teaching-focused faculty position, it may make more sense to place the Teaching Experience section before the research-related sections.

Tips and Tricks

Here we highlight some common tips and tricks related to formatting the contents of your CV.

1. Be brief but descriptive. No one wants to read a massive wall of text about a research project you worked on that one summer, but describing what you did is still useful. For instances where some extra descriptive text is called for, try to summarize in just a couple of sentences.
2. Use lists (see what we did there?). Lists are a great way to break up large sections of text. Lists will help to prevent the “wall of text” issue and provide a natural format for summaries consisting of a couple of sentences.
3. Quantify your work. When discussing things like your research, work, or teaching experiences, try to quantify those experiences where sensible. Consider the differences between the following:
   • “Identified exoplanets” and “identified 4 exoplanets”.
   • “Did nighttime observations” and “Spent 40 nights observing”
   • “Processed detector events” and “processed 2 million detector events”
   • “Taught lab with astronomy undergraduates” and “taught lab with 40 astronomy undergraduates”
4. Consistency! Do your best to keep the formatting the same across your CV. Are all of the section headers styled the same? Do all of your lists use the same bullet structure? Do the citations and references to your research products use the same citation format (up to slight differences for different types of products, such as poster vs. publication)? This might be a little tricky in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, which are notorious for being finicky with this, but do your best! If you’re really craving more control for the sake of consistency, consider switching to LaTeX/Overleaf.
5. After reading the previous point, keep in mind not to let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”. Some people get so wrapped up in getting the formatting just the way they want it for some tiny detail that it becomes more of a hindrance than a benefit. Especially if you’re just starting out, don’t be afraid to work with a template or style that is “good enough” for now—you can tweak it with your preferences later.
6. When it comes to things like color and graphics, these things can help your CV stand out, but you should be very careful with them—otherwise, the style deviates so far from “normal” that it’s more distracting than interesting. If you are going to do something like add color, be careful and get feedback from someone else on how it looks.

Thoughts from the Authors

Here are some final thoughts from this guide’s authors!

Skylar

• I have an “everything” CV where I put down every single thing I’m doing. And then when applying to specific things I might remove bullets or whole sections that aren’t applicable. But keeping a running list is helpful, especially as you move through your career, to ensure you don’t accidentally leave something out (which can definitely happen if you only sit down to write a CV when it comes time for applications).
• When looking at examples of other people’s CVs and maybe even reading this guide, you might be worried that you’re not doing enough or that you aren’t accomplishing everything you should. While it’s important to have a CV for your career, I want to remind you that who you are cannot be listed on paper, and that what is or isn’t on your CV doesn’t define you!

Brandon

• In my “Education” section, I provide a brief list (one line or so) of what coursework each degree covers. Part of this is to be clear about what coursework I’ve taken since this varies from university to university, and because one of my degrees has an uncommon name where many people may not understand what it entails.
• I have a section on my CV called “Outreach, Service, and Involvement”, which encompasses a couple of the sections we described above. This section includes my science communication work with Astrobites; outreach presentations; volunteer experience in my community; and service and involvement at each university I’ve attended, including extracurricular activities.
• At the very end of my CV, I have a section for the languages that I speak and my proficiency level in each. Being able to speak a second (or third or fourth or …) language can be a great asset to highlight on your CV, especially if you plan to apply to a place where languages other than English are common. I only have two (right now), but I hope to be able to list more in the future!
• To echo Skylar’s point above, I have a “master” CV that contains everything I could ever hope to include on my CV, including stuff that is in progress. If I deem something isn’t relevant or if something gets completed, I simply hide or unhide it. In LaTeX, this is as simple as uncommenting or commenting out lines.

Bill

• This might be a bit advanced for this guide, but one strategy I use for grad school is to keep three CVs. One is my current CV, one is my “in progress CV”, and one is my “dream CV”. My dream CV is what I want my CV to look like when I finish graduate school, with a list of the fellowships, publications, outreach, etc. I want to have when I graduate (certainly not achievable, but that is OK). From that CV, I take the two or three CV lines I am working on at any specific time (e.g., one publication and one outreach thing), and I put them on my “in progress CV”. My “in progress CV” is a copy of my regular up-to-date CV, but with a highlighted addition of the two or three things I am currently working on. This helps me stay motivated and focused on the bigger picture, and also helps me keep my CV up to date as I progress through grad school since when I finish one of my highlighted things on my “in progress CV”, I just unhighlight it and add it as a new line on my regular CV.

Anavi

• You shouldn’t feel limited to the CV sections that we’ve described in this guide! For example, science writing/communication is really important to me, so I have an entire section dedicated to my popular science articles. Your CV is meant to display your professional identity and accomplishments, so feel free to adjust it to your needs.
• Include links where appropriate! For example, a link to a recording of a talk you gave, or a paper you wrote, or the description of an award that people might not be familiar with.
• I personally used this template on Overleaf to make my CV, but there are lots of other templates that people love. I recommend asking people in your department what they use! Here’s an example of what my CV looked like when I applied to grad school, so that you can see the template in action. Note that this is by no means a perfect example, and everyone’s CV will look different.

Maria

• I always like to start from a platform that helps host information necessary to advertise yourself for a job, like LinkedIn, for example. It helps you organize your data before you start making your CV.
• Details are important, but an excess of details can be off-putting. Learn to find the balance between the necessary credentials, and the credentials that simply look nice, but aren’t informative.
• Make sure to highlight experiences relevant for the job you’re applying for. For example, when applying to grad school, I made sure the things that stood out were my undergrad research projects and my upper-division coursework, as my majors (Geophysics and Astrophysics) are not as common and widespread as something related like Geology and Physics. I felt it relevant to highlight how prepared I was for the grad program. But I wouldn’t necessarily highlight that coursework when applying for a job after grad school, may it be a postdoc in academia or a technical position in industry. While I also include my involvement in outreach and various committees, I have omitted them on occasion when the submitting the CV for some program or grant that’s purely research-oriented; but I would keep them in places where involvement in community-oriented events would be useful to highlight (like workshops, and some academic positions and grants that have an outreach component to them).
• Soft skills are more important than you realize! The ability to write a piece of code, using GitHub to work in a collaborative setting, and having familiarity and experience with version control may seem rudimentary, but still very vital to stress as those are skills you typically learn and develop on your own time and can help you distinguish yourself from a lot of your peers.

Our CVs

Below you can find some examples of our CVs, both past and current. Use them to help formulate what your CV could look like, but remember everybody is going to have unique experience, and that what you do or don’t have on your CV doesn’t define you.

• Skylar’s Undergraduate CV and Current CV
• Brandon’s Undergraduate CV and Current CV
• Anavi’s Undergraduate CV and Current CV
• Maria’s Undergraduate CV and Current CV

Guide edited by Mckenzie Ferrari and Ryan White

Featured image credit: Maria Vincent