Thursday, August 25, 2011

Updating my CV

I am updating my CV now in preparation for a bunch of proposals I am writing for September and October. I am new to the TT, but have more experience than the typical new prof in my field. I have a hybrid-type CV from my years at National Lab that has a long professional experience section describing what I did at each position held in my career (the norm for National Lab) and still includes experiences from PhD U.

Although I am a relative TT noob, I am not eligible for most New Investigator programs due to the time since my PhD. So it feels really weird to me to still have my TA experience and grad school awards on my CV. But it seems most of my peers at the Assistant Professor level in my field keep this stuff on (at least from looking at CVs posted online). I feel like I am a little in no-man's land.

I am thinking of cutting down the professional experience suggestion to the basics, and letting my papers/presentations/patents speak for the work I did. That seems to be more typical for an academic CV. However, I also see people who have more extensive experience descriptions like is common for researchers outside academia, so that makes me reluctant to hit the delete key. I also think I am going to remove TA details and awards and service from before I finished my PhD, but maybe this is stupid if everyone else is keeping this stuff on theirs. What would you do? Any advice?

4 comments:

Dr. Dad, PhD said...

Where are you applying to? What kind of grant (big award, mentored, etc)? The answers to these questions may impact the format a bit.

My personal instinct is to not include the descriptions in the experience section. I'd keep the awards/honors (at least the big ones)from before you finished your PhD.

I should warn you, however that I have yet to land a TT job. I'll be watching this post to see what others say...

GMP said...

I think I had a few brief paragraphs on the main projects when I applied for the TT positions. Now I have a bulleted list called Research Areas, under which I list my main directions of research (so not as long as before). My CV starts with name, address, education, appointments, expertise (i,.e. research areas list), honors and awards, and then somewhere on page 2 start the journal papers, then conference papers, invited talks, contributed talks, teaching and advising, service.

Under teaching, I still list my grad school experience even though I have had full 7 years of teaching as a prof already. I do it to show breadth of courses in different departments (also taught high school for a bit) but I agree that as you get further in your career it becomes obsolete and I am considering removing teaching stuff prior to the tenure track. I have seen CV's with stuff going back as far as high school (a rising star had that, to show how she was awesome from an early age).

gleeb said...

Hello, it would be really nice if you could add a search widget to your blog. That way we can search internally for your comments (such as on Mendeley, that I'm interested in). Look under Layout, click "add a gadget" on the page where you want it to go, and choose "search box" from the Basic list.
Cheers

prodigal academic said...

Done! Thanks for the comment, gleeb.