Applying to grad school can sometimes feel like a maze where documents are requested, fees are paid, tests are taken, and essays are written, all without any seeming rhyme or reason. How can you make sense of it all, and be successful in your quest for admission to a graduate program?
I'll break it down, step by step, in weekly installments of the Grad School Admissions Tip of the Week. This week, we'll talk about your CV: Do schools need it? How should it be formatted? What should it include?
Although not all grad schools will request that you submit a résumé or curriculum vitae (CV) with your application, many will. It is important to know what to include, what not to include, and how long the document should be.
A standard job-seeking résume will not work for a grad school application, nor will a standard one-page academic résumé. Given the focus of graduate school on academic work, it is recommended that you create a multi-page CV with a strong focus on your academic background, achievements, and strengths. You will also include information on your most recent employment history, your activities, and your personal interests, but the focus of the CV should be academic information relevant to the program to which you are applying. Here are your CV basics.
There are a number of sections your CV will include:
Contact information
Includes your name, address, phone number, and email. A few notes:
- Salutations (Mr., Mrs., Ms.) are not necessary unless they denote a professional title (such as Dr., or Esq.).
- Your email address should be professional (no poohbear123@mailservice.com). Keep it simple and recognizable, such as firstname.lastname@mailservice.com.
- Your phone number should go directly to you.
- Your address should be your current residence, where you can receive mail in a timely fashion.
Educational background
Indicate the institutions you have attended, the years of attendance, and the degree conferred. If you have not graduated from your most recent institution, list your major and expected date of completion. You do not need to list GPA, standardized test information, or honors and awards (these last two will be listed in their own section).
Academic achievements
Here, you will list any honors, awards, and substantial papers (for example, your college thesis) that you have written but which have not been published. A few notes:
- For honors and awards, list the year given, the name of the prize, and include a brief explanation of the criteria used to award it. Do not assume schools will be familiar with all academic honors and awards--there are hundreds. It is your responsibility to provide them with the necessary information.
- For substantial academic papers, include the year written, the title of the work, and a brief description of the content.
Teaching experience
If you already have teaching experience under your belt, make sure to list it here. List the course taught, the years taught, your supervising professor, and the institution at which you taught. List whether you created the curriculum, whether you were the only instructor or if it was co-taught, and the number of students in your class. Do not worry if, as an undergrad, you do not have any teaching experience. You are not expected to have any. However, make sure to highlight it if you do.
Research experience
List any formal research experience you have had working under a faculty member. List the institutions at which the research was conducted, the dates during which it was conducted, the topics researched, and any resulting papers or publication.
Grants awarded
Although unlikely that undergraduates will have information to include in this section, if you have been awarded any grants, list the year granted, the dollar amount, the granting institution, and the purpose of the funds (projects, etc).
Publications
List any publications in which you have been published in a research capacity relevant to the field in which you are now seeking a degree. Include the date, name of the publication, name of the piece, and description of the contents.
Professional experience outside of academia
Here you will list your employment history. Typically, you will want to go back as far as five years, although some schools may require a longer time period. Be sure to list the name of the employer, location, position you held, dates of employment, and a brief description of your duties and responsibilities. Since this is not the primary concern of your CV, the description does not need to be extensive.
Professional affiliations
List any groups or professional societies with which you are affiliated, your date of initial affiliation, and any administrative or leadership positions held.
References
Although a CV typically requires the inclusion of this information, since you will be submitting letters of recommendation with your application it may not be necessary for you to add this section.
* * *
Some formatting guidelines
There is no required or limited length to the CV. It typically will run between 3-5 pages. Anywhere within this range is acceptable. If it results in only 2 pages but includes all relevant information, that is fine, as well.
Don't feel that you need to include something for all the categories listed above. Include information only for the ones which apply to you. If one does not apply, simply leave it out.
All citations should be either in MLA or APA format (choose that which is either required or preferred in the application or your field of study). Make this formatting consistent throughout.
Keep margins of 1" all around the document, and keep the font to 12pt. This will make the document easy to read.
Left-align the document. The eye naturally travels down the left side of a page when reading a document of this sort--make it easy for your readers to visually scan your CV.
As a final note, make sure to have someone (or a few someones) read your CV before you consider it "final." Having a second, third, even fourth pair of eyes taking a look at your materials will help--and they may remember something about you that you didn't include (but should have!).
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Have a question about applying to grad school you'd like me to answer? Send me an email.
Check out the Grad School Admissions Tip of the Week archives!
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Applying to grad school can sometimes feel like a maze where documents are requested, fees are paid, tests are taken, and essays are written, all without any seeming rhyme or reason. How can you make sense of it all, and be successful in your quest for admission to a graduate program?
I'll break it down, step by step, in weekly installments of the Grad School Admissions Tip of the Week. This week, we'll talk about your statement of purpose: What it is and how you should write it.
The statement of purpose is one of the primary elements of your grad school application. In it, you directly address why you want to go to grad school, why you're interested in your particular academic field, why you're qualified for graduate study, and what you career plan is. This is why it's called the statement of purpose--you're distilling your purpose in pursuing a graduate education, detailing your plans for this particular academic path.
This essay is, in theory, very easy to write—at this point, you should have already conducted heavy research into each school you are interested in, and you should have also undertaken intense self-evaluation to determine why you want to attend those schools and what you want to do with your graduate education. However, articulating this information may prove difficult--and the inability to clearly present your reasons and plans may result in a very vague statement that leaves schools wondering why you're applying there in the first place.
Let's start by taking a look at a common statement of purpose prompt. We'll use the one for UCLA's PhD Program in Psychology (you can see our spotlight on that program here):
Please write an essay, approximately 2 to 4 typewritten pages which can be either single or double spaced. Please state your purpose in applying for graduate study, your particular area of specialization within the major, your plans for future occupation or profession, and any additional information that may aid the selection committee in evaluating your preparation and your aptitude for graduate study at UCLA.
Let's determine exactly what UCLA (and pretty much all other graduate schools) will want to hear about in your statement:
- "Your purpose in applying for graduate study." This means you have a concrete, well-thought-out reason for wanting to pursue this course of academic action. Something akin to "I don't know what else to do," or "It seems like fun" will simply not cut it. This degree needs to fit in with your academic, professional, and overall life plans, and you need to be able to clearly articulate why.
- "Your particular area of specialization within the major." This means you need to go beyond the basic academic umbrella, and go into this program knowing your field of specialization. This automatically implies that you need to know your field of interest well enough to be able to pick a specialty before you even set foot on campus. If you can't answer this question, you may not be ready for graduate study.
- "Your plans for future occupation or profession." This includes your career goals (which means you need to have thought about them already).
- "Any additional information that may aid the selection committee in evaluating your preparation and your aptitude for graduate study." The key here is noting that the additional information needs to be related to your preparation and your aptitude for graduate study. This means that your answer, while it can branch out and talk about subjects other than your purpose, specialization, and plans for graduate study, still needs to somehow relate back to graduate study. This is not the time to completely go off on a tangent and talk about your prowess in marathon running, or your penchant for travel in Asia (unless either of these directly relate back to the field you will be studying). Your focus on the statement of purpose needs to remain on your graduate studies.
So, how do you go about penning this essay? As I mentioned previously, you should have already done extensive research into each school (so you already know why you are applying), and you should have already reflected deeply as to why graduate school, and a particular field of study, is for you. Now's the time to fine tune this research and self-knowledge. Do the following:
- Research. Spend time going over the specifics of each school, in particular the academic path you want to follow. Find information about classes, specializations, professors, and academic offerings unique to the school that make it an ideal choice for you.
- Interview. If possible, talk to professors in your field, and those already practicing in similar areas to the one you want to pursue. Ask them about how they spend their days, what they enjoy about their job, and what made them choose it. Ask professors about the subjects they teach, and why they teach them.
- Think. Once all this information has been obtained, carefully consider valid reasons for why you want to go to grad school, and why you want to follow this particular career path.
- Articulate. Talk to someone close to you about your reasons for why you're choosing these particular schools and programs. This will help you organize your thoughts, and will allow you to hear your arguments out loud (which can be very helpful).
Don't feel that you need to tell a grad school how well-rounded you are. It's simply not necessary. They are not interested in your hobbies outside of your academic interest--at least, not in the statement of purpose. What they're looking for in the statement of purpose is evidence of academic prowess and desire to delve deeply and master a very specific academic subject.
In addition, make sure to highlight those activities and skills that will underscore your ability to undertake graduate work. Research, writing, reading--all of these are important. If you've taught classes before, in any subject, make sure to bring it up--graduate students are often called upon or required to assist with, teach, or even create academic courses, so if you have these skills already, make sure to turn them into a part of your statement.
Above all, give yourself time to write this statement. Don't try to create it from start to finish in a few hours, or even a few days. This essay will be highly scrutinized, so make sure it is exceptional. Allow yourself to think, process, brainstorm, and write multiple drafts, until you're pleased with the results, and know that you're put your absolute best forward.
____________________
Have a question about applying to grad school you'd like me to answer? Send me an email.
Check out the Grad School Admissions Tip of the Week archives!
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When you're working your way through the GRE, it's easy to get caught up in a difficult question, and the test-makers know it; that is why the questions are not presented in a perfect order of difficulty (it is true that the first question of a section is generally more straightforward than the last, but there can be a good bit of variety in the middle). Even if the test makers did want to put the questions in order of difficulty, everyone has a different set of strengths and weaknesses, so “difficulty” wouldn’t apply universally anyway.
All of this is to say, the questions that are most challenging for you will likely show up in random places in a section--so when you encounter one, skip it! Generally, you can tell by reading just the first line or two of a question (or analyzing the concepts involved), and make an informed decision about your likelihood of answering it correctly. The point is, the more quickly you skip over any question that even looks like it will be annoying, the better off you will be, since (1) this allows you a greater chance of answering all the questions you’re most likely to get right, and (2) you can return to any skipped questions during your remaining time, after you’ve knocked out the questions with which you felt most comfortable.
There is no reason to stick with a difficult question when you could be breezing through the more straightforward questions that happen to have been placed later in the section. Take a practice section or two to get used to skipping past initially-confusing questions, and you should notice not only a greater sense of comfort with the test, but a higher score as well!