Speaker 1: Alongside a personal statement, the CV, also known as a resume, is probably the most important document that provides an employer, provides a university, an admissions tutor, with the information about you contained. So that could be your academics, that includes your experience, that includes your skill set and your interests. So that's why it's really important that you take particular care into perfecting and getting that CV right, just as if you would for a personal statement. So CV stands for the course of your life, so essentially showing what you've done and your achievements, your academics for your lifetimes. That usually starts from when you're in secondary school, that can start from university, and the most relevant information that you need to present to someone to show them that you have the academics, the skill set, and the interests, the qualifications that you need to enter and be accepted into a particular job or particular degree. In this video I'm specifically speaking about a CV for university, so that could be for grad school, that means a CV for either a PhD, for a Masters, for an internship, a CV to get into university, for maybe an extended course, so something that requires an academic experience more than a career job, so just bear that in mind. A CV tends to be a slightly longer document, so rather than being a one page resume, it's more than it is sort of two pages, sometimes three pages, but do look for the requirements because a lot of jobs, a lot of postings will say that they want a CV that's no longer than two pages, so you do need to make sure that you're sticking and abiding by those requirements, but usually it's slightly longer and slightly more detailed than your sort of standard resume or CV that you might present for a job. And before we get into this, I just want to point out that I have another video about personal statements, so when you're writing your CV, you need to think about the personal statement as well and trying to make sure that they match and trying to make sure that you are not necessarily repeating information but you're providing sort of supplementary information or going into more detail into the most relevant parts in your personal statement. So there's that video there so do go and check it out when you finish this one. So I'm going to be focusing on three aspects of your CV. The first is content, second is formatting and the third is actually editing it and I'll be showing you over here a bit of my CV, taking out the information obviously, taking out my personal details but showing you sort of the layout and what you want it to look like. Academic CVs tend to be less creative I would say, I've seen loads of CVs for the creative industries that look very elaborate and really beautiful but for academic and grad school CVs it does need to be quite professional so do stick to sort of black and white, stick to sort of one font and you'll see sort of what that looks like here. So let's start from the top, so right at the top of your CV you want to include your personal details, that includes your name, that includes your location and even now that would include a LinkedIn possibly, or even a website where you might have a blog, you know a blog that kind of encompasses all your academic work, or even a research page if you have sort of Research Gates or any sort of Google Scholar page, a page where, an online page where you might have all your work displayed, any research papers that you are part of, things like that. Any sort of detail, contact number, emails, that should all be right at the top where you can see it first. So for the content you want to start off with your academics. Now this is very different, like I said, to a job, when you're applying for a job role, because with that you want to start with your experience, your skillset, etc. With the academic, the grad school CV, you want to start with your academic experience and your academic accomplishments. So that would be if you've done a masters, if you've done a PhD, if you've done an undergrad, whatever it is, you want to start from that point there. And you want to make sure that by the first of 30 seconds, the person looking at this CV has understood that this is what you've done so far and you're aiming to start a PhD. you've done a masters, you've got a two distinction or whatever, you've got a merit from this university, these are the modules that you did, and that is the first thing they are interested in, and you want to grab their attention with that straight away. When you're trying to do this, think about what the most relevant parts of your job that you're applying for. When I say job, I mean the position, so that could be, like I said, post-grad, post-doc, whatever it is, but a research graduate school role. Whatever it is you're applying for, you want to think about what the most relevant skills are, and do those first few lines show and reflect that? If yes, then that's absolutely fine, if no, then try to put something more relevant at the top, but stick to the academics. You want to write your experiences in reverse chronological order, that means you start from the most recent thing first, so you don't start from the oldest thing, you start from where you're currently at, and where your last position was, and then the position before that, so in my case that'll be PhD, and then it'll be Masters, and then it'll be my undergrad, and so on and so forth. You don't start with the undergrad first, because that in this case would be the least relevant thing. I would recommend breaking it down, your academics, even further into the particular degree that you've done. So I'm assuming you might be applying for a PhD position, which means you've got a master's and you've got an undergraduate. So split those two things up because within them you're going to have a range of experience. So I would start off by having like a subheading saying master's and then within master's I, for example, did two six-month projects that were very different and they would be different experiences with different supervisors, different labs, different dates and different topics. I published in them and they were different papers. So those are, you know, separate experiences. Then I got my, I've got my undergrad. In my undergrad, I did an intern, like a studentship during the summer. I did a module, six weeks research module. So all of those experiences kind of come into those different sections. Again, they really help to break down and clarify to the board sort of what it is that you've done, when you did them and kind of in what capacity. So after listing your academic experience, you then want to have a quick section that's called research interests. And here you can just bullet point or just quickly list a few interests of yours related to research. So what topic, what subtopics, what parts of science or whatever it is that you're doing are you particularly interested in? That can just be one line, but it stands out for the reader. They've seen your academics, they can now see the research interests. The next thing on my CV would be scholarships and awards. So anything that I that I have been awarded related to, again, related to science, related to your research. In this case, for me, it would be any scholarships or awards. So for example, during my undergrad, I got a scholarship to be in a lab for six months during the summer. That would be listed there. I got a scholarship for my master's. That would be listed there. And just the details of, you know, who awarded it, what the, you know, what the dates were, and even maybe the amount that you were awarded. Not necessary, but you could include all that information if you wanted to. But again, it just shows that you're able to win awards and you're someone that the research world really wants. Then moving on, you want to include your research experience or your technical experience. So again, depends on what your experiences are, but your research experience would be things like actually when you were in the lab, what did you do? What skill sets do you have? Can you do PCR? Can you do Western blots? What can you actually do? And then more technical skills, if you're good at maybe MATLAB, coding, data science, whatever, anything technical that you can throw into there would be also really useful. just kind of giving you know maybe mentioning one line as to what skill is and then having a sort of a brief summary just no more than two lines to a bit more detail so what is it that you actually involved in what is it that you can say that you feel you know you've got some sort of skills some sort of competency in. I then like to include any manuscripts or publications that I have as I mentioned earlier this is really really important you may not have any which is absolutely fine you might also have some that are under review which means that they are out but they're you know under review they're being edited they're being sort of looked at by the by the journal so that can be included as well. It takes a long time to publish papers so if you have got something in the works definitely include it there, don't be afraid to do that. It shows that you are aware of the publishing process which is actually quite cumbersome, quite long, takes you know years just to publish one paper so definitely include any papers that are under review or being edited or currently being written or even drafted. I would 100% include those and if you have any papers that have been published then don't forget to include a link to them or even like you the number that you can recognise them by. But yeah, including any information where you have had any participation would be ideal. You then want to skip to conference presentations or sort of invited talks. So again, this is something that is really specific to academia and grad school, where you have, you know, you've presented a paper, a poster, a presentation, and you've just been present in a space where it's usually taken up by academics. And that looks really, really good. It shows, it doesn't matter how small or big the conference was but it just shows that you are aware of sort of normal kind of doings by a researcher, the normal kind of day-to-day life, things that can happen, you've been, you know, you've been in conferences, you've networked, you've been in those places, it looks really good especially if you're someone who's quite new to the field and you're someone who's trying to get yourself into, you know, your first postdoc, maybe your first PhD position. I'm showing that you've been to some talks, you've presented some presentations, you've been able to communicate your research in a way that's different to just being in a lab and being by yourself, that all looks really good. And then lastly, I've got organisational affiliations as well, so if you're part of any sort of society, that also is important to recognise. It shows that you are, again, being part of that network and it shows a sort of a wider interest. So you're not just there because you want a PhD, you're actually there because you are genuinely interested in this particular subject, in this particular area and you want to learn more from those that maybe have more experience than you. And then last but not least, extracurricular activities. is a really important section because this shows you know a bit more of your personality. So so far we've been quite academic heavy which is you know i think more than more than you know correct for a cv for grad school or an academic cv but when you get to that end you you know you want to see some personality so what are some things that you do try to make it relatable try to make it something where you're maybe you have a position of responsibility if you're the head of a society or if you have a blog or if you have something online a business and just something that shows that you're kind of keeping up with something else at the same time and you're able to juggle sort of multiple demands. I'll actually leave a link to the template for the CV in my bio down below so do click on that and you can feel free to download it and then you just add in your own information. It's just a template so you can obviously add your own information and feel free to delete as you please and feel free to delete as you please. So moving on to formatting now this is just as important I would say as the content itself. So formatting is I would stick to the basics as I mentioned earlier. Black and white using one single font. If you want to highlight something you could use bold. Something I also like to do from using like subheadings is italics. Italics works really well as well as an alternative to using a different font or colour but typically stick to one font size for like the main headings, one font size for everything in between and then just either italicising or using bold to help things stand out. The main thing here is to be consistent so if you're italicising like supervisor's name or university name make sure that all the universities that you've mentioned are also in italics otherwise it looks very obvious once the whole cv is completed. Save your cv as a pdf before you submit it of course and just make sure that you've saved it like cv, first name Amina, second name Jonas and that's it you're good to go. So just nice and clean so you're able to send it to the person that you want to submit it to, you know that you know the text isn't going to be jumbled and it's in a clean sort of two-page pdf format and to edit there's one tip that i can give you and that's show your cv to someone else that someone else does not have to be academic that someone else can be someone who anyone really someone who knows you can take a look at the cv and you can ask them all right we need 30 seconds and then we'll take it off you i'm going to ask you a question and then give them 30 seconds take it off them and ask them you know what did the cv say to you and they should be able able to pull out something, well, hopefully the most important thing from your CV should be able to be pulled out. If they are able to tell you what you want, so that would be maybe your research interests, maybe the last degree you did, maybe your key strength, that's amazing. If they're unable to or they're able to tell you something or they're telling you something that happened 20 years ago that's kind of irrelevant to today, that tells you that the information that you're presenting is either not in the right order, you're not giving the right information, it's due space, and you do need to rearrange and think about a little bit. If you can give your CV to someone in the academic, you know, space that'll be even better because like I said it just means that you're able to get an actual professional eye looking at this but I would probably myself give it to someone who is not in the same field as me to see whether they are seeing what I feel like I'm seeing. I hope that you found this useful, like I said I'm going to put the template for the CV down below, I'll probably save it on Google Drive or something and I'll stick it down below so feel free to grab that. It is just a template so feel free to kind of shuffle things around a bit if you want, always stick to the order of having your academic stuff right at the top so you're able to access it first and then all the kind of supplementary information as you go along. I hope you found this useful and if you did don't forget to subscribe, give me a like and I'll see you guys in my next video, bye.