Gentle reader,

I'd like to get personal for a moment, if I may. Like many of you, I'm a graduate student, and I share your concerns and insecurities about professional development. When researching each issue, I consistently find useful articles on a subject that can be a challenge for many of us: the curriculum vitae. Many of us don't know where to begin when writing a CV or feel ours are inadequate. I know I recently looked at a former colleague's now intimidating 10-page CV online and watched my own instantly wither in my estimation. And so, Val and I got the idea to assemble a theme issue of Future 411 that focused on CVs this month. 

We would like to take this opportunity to focus on the work of an important partner resource on campus: the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP). While Career Services certainly works to serve job seekers on the academic career track, the GTP specializes in assisting with academic career development, and every future professor should avail themselves of their services. We also recommend their help to those with non-academic career goals as a complement to what we offer. Read on for interviews with the director of the GTP and post-doc CU-Boulder alumni who works with the GTP for details about how the program can help with your CV. We are also glad to include perspective and advice from a graduate student who has built an outstanding CV that uses her unorthodox career path her to advantage. This month's articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and Science Careers focus on writing, changing, and critiquing CVs and resumes to round out February's theme. 

We hope you will find this approach useful and interesting and that other theme issues might follow. You are always welcome to come to Career Services office in the Center for Community for support, and we hope you will explore the Graduate Teacher Training Program's resources as well. Both can help you a great deal with your job hunting and career planning. And let us know what you think -- we always like to hear from you! 

Dr. Laura Border has been the director of the Graduate Teacher Program at CU-Boulder since 1985.

What is the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP)? What does it offer to whom, and how can students get involved?

The GTP offers comprehensive college teacher training, support research skill development, and academic and nonacademic career preparation opportunities to graduate students in all CU-Boulder schools and colleges through conferences, workshops, and individual consultations. The GTP offers activities that help masters and doctoral students transition to careers in the business, government, and nonprofit sectors. The program also offers specialized workshops in grant proposal writing, resume and CV preparation, public speaking, job interview assistance, research misconduct, and professional career opportunities for graduate students in all fields and with every possible career track in mind.

Any CU-Boulder graduate student, staff, postdoc, research assistant or fellow, faculty member or member of the Colorado Preparing Future Faculty Network may attend GTP workshops, intensives, and seminars. More information, including a complete FAQ list and details on upcoming activities and the current schedule of workshops, forums, and other events are available at http://www.colorado.edu/gtp/.

What role does the CV play in a successful academic job search?

It is important to distinguish between a resume and a CV. Resumes are used outside of academe, while a Curriculum Vitae is essentially "the (his)story of one's academic career"  in postsecondary education. A hiring committee in any college or university will typically ask candidates to submit three documents: a letter of application, a CV, and a teaching statement. As the backbone of any academic job search, the CV documents the three essential aspects of an academic's role in postsecondary education: teaching, research, and service. A hiring committee can review your CV and determine if you have the educational training and experience necessary, the teaching experience that they desire, the research training and production required for the job, and based on your service record, they can immediately determine if you are willing to be a collegial contributor to your department, college and/or university, and disciplinary association.

What are the important elements of an effective CV and why?

A CV lays out an academic's qualifications and echoes the three roles-teaching, research, and service -that academics fill in post-secondary institutions. Typical divisions of the CV include educational background, academic employment history, awards and honors, publications (including peer reviewed articles and chapters, books, and non peer reviewed publications), conference presentations, grants received, academic service (including national and international, college and university, and local, national and international outreach). 

I also encourage graduate students to add a section to their CV that includes "Academic Professional Development" to document extra work they have done to prepare themselves as effective college and university faculty. For example, through the GTP, graduate students can attend workshops, complete certificates, participate in site visits to neighboring campuses, or be training to serve as a lead graduate teacher. Documenting this academic professional development can definitely make them stand out as exceptional candidates in any job search.

What specific resources does the GTP offer for those who are looking to build a new CV or improve the one they have?

The GTP offers workshops on writing a CV and consults one-on-one with graduates students who are seeking academic positions. We also encourage graduate students to begin maintaining their CVs while still in their graduate programs by requiring the submission of CVs for completion of our Certificate in College Teaching and our Professional Development Certificate for Preparing Future Faculty. We also require Lead Graduate Teachers to submit CVs when they apply to serve as Leads. 

What is your role with Graduate Teacher Program (GTP) and what kind of work have you been doing?
I am currently in an administrative postdoc position at the GTP: my job title is Lead Coordinator for Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. In this role I offer mentoring, consultation, and pedagogical training to graduate student teachers from all disciplines. The GTP offers a wide variety of pedagogical and professional development services and I help out with these in many ways, from hosting workshops to helping organize and manage events.

You recently led a workshop called "Preparing your CV and other materials for the academic job search" through the GTP. Tell us a little about it, please.
This workshop was designed to help graduate students from all disciplines prepare or revise their CV and other materials for the academic job search. We discuss aspects of CVs, teaching portfolios, research statements and other documents that will be needed, and the participants looked at seven sample CVs from graduate students in different fields, at different stages of their academic careers.  Using these samples, participants spent time thinking about and revising their CVs to improve them.

When should graduate students start thinking about preparing their own CV, and why?
During their first year: that way, they can develop a template for their CV that they can just add to over the years, revising it for clarity along the way. Unfortunately, most grads aren't trained (or told) to do this until later in their grad careers, resulting in the painstaking task of trying to remember and record all they have done so far, for their own training and professional development, onto their CV when already three or four years into their Ph.D. programs.

What resources do you suggest to those who seek to build and improve their own CV in preparation for an academic career?
Grads at CU-Boulder can come to the GTP for help building and revising their CV, or they can attend workshops on this topic online, at Career Services, or in their home department. I think the best resource is to look over a variety of CVs from one's own discipline to discern the sections one needs, and the type of formatting, expected in that particular field.  A CV from a Ph.D. in English or Theatre will look very different from one in Biology or Physics.

What lessons about CV dos and don'ts have you personally learned during your time as a Ph.D. student and post-doc fellow at CU? What advice would you give fellow academic job seekers?
Don't be intimidated by the CVs of faculty and top researchers, which are often 10+ pages long. Your CV will reach that length faster than you think, just get one started and add to it every time you complete a presentation (research or invited), fulfill a service role, or publish.  When you reach the later stages of your graduate career (e.g., thesis writing), ask several people in your department - and a few family or friends - to look over your CV for presentation, content, grammar, and tone.  Do not embellish, but do not leave out important things that you have accomplished either.  

When you send in your job-application materials, you're not just assembling separate documents to fulfill the requirements of an ad. Those documents are part of a larger rhetorical whole, and together they form an argument for the viability of your candidacy for a particular job.

In a fall seminar at George Mason University, "Preparing for Careers in the Academy," I worked with advanced doctoral students to help them think about the larger message they were sending in their application materials. We all know that the tenure-track market in many fields is tough, and that the odds of success are long. But rather than just rant about the state of academe, or belittle candidates for seemingly tilting at windmills, it's important that we help those who want to pursue a tenure-track job.

I wanted students in the seminar to understand that each of their documents should be crafted meticulously, paying close attention to the rhetorical choices they are making. Other elements -- the organization of their documents, the inclusion or omission of certain kinds of information, the use of white space-were equally important in building a case for themselves. Read more