PDFLINK |
Dear Early Career
I am applying for jobs this year. What should I put on my CV? —Job Applicant
Dear Job Applicant,
Let’s start with the essentials that your CV should include. Your CV should include your education, appointments and positions, research interests, and your publications. Your education includes a list of degrees along with the institution and date received, as well as your advisor’s name. Your appointments and positions, also known as employment, should include your job titles, the organization names and locations, as well as your start and end dates. Your research interests include primary and secondary interests, and you may choose to include MSC numbers. Your publication list consists of published papers; It may also include work on the arXiv and work in progress (more on this momentarily), just indicate this by including an arXiv identifier or the words “work in progress.”
It is also helpful to employers if you include a list of courses that you were involved with teaching. Early in your career, you may have limited teaching experience, and it can be helpful to use descriptive language to specify your roles. For instance, “lead recitations and graded for Calculus II,” “mentor for Business Calculus” and“fully responsible for teaching Linear Algebra.”
Your CV should be easy to navigate, and one should be able to locate each of the basic items listed above within a few seconds. You can use formatting, bold text, and bulleted lists. Many mathematicians include a direct link to their CV on their professional websites, and so there are many samples out there that you can use to gain inspiration for formatting, organization, and content. Put yourself in the shoes of a member of the hiring committee; many of these folks look through hundreds of files. Their job is to figure out who you are as a mathematician, researcher, teacher, and member of the mathematical community, and your CV needs to make their job easier.
With the basics out of the way, there are other items that can boost your CV, including mentoring experience, conference organization and participation, upcoming and past talks, grants and awards received.
In fact, you may choose to list work-in-progress in your publication list to spotlight that you have work in the pipeline. I especially encourage this if your forthcoming work is in a new area. A postdoc that I know, for instance, is doing some fantastic research in a new area that is outside his immediate area of expertise. Working in this area required him to first learn the relevant background and took up a significant amount of time. Given that he had already given some talks on his results, I encouraged him to list the project in his publication list as forthcoming work so that it would be more visible to potential employers. In general, listing work-in-progress in a new area is a good way to communicate forthcoming work and may add depth to your research expertise.
Finally, put some positivity into your CV while creating it. You have made it this far, and your CV is a celebration of all your accomplishments.
—Early Career editors
Have a question that you think would fit into our Dear Early Career column? Submit it to Taylor.2952@osu.edu or bjaye3@gatech.edu with the subject Early Career.