CVs and padding

Your CV is a crucial document in your professional career. You will use it to apply for fellowships, jobs, awards, and funding. Your department may use it for merit/bonus determination. They certainly will for promotion/retention purposes. Especially when starting out, when your CV is short, the temptation to pad it is very strong. Today I am telling you to avoid the temptation and just don't do it!

1. Standing out for the wrong reasons
It is often obvious when someone is trying to pad their CV. People reading your CV don't use the "stair method" to find the longest CV--for whatever evaluation purpose, the point is to look for quality, not quantity. When on a committee where people are evaluating dossiers together, you don't want to the one people read out loud for a laugh because your padding attempt is so obvious (and, unfortunately, this does happen).

2. What is "obvious padding"?
Please DON'T list more than one or maybe two manuscripts in preparation. Anything can be in preparation, and it looks like padding. If you do list anything in preparation, don't bother putting a journal name. It is meaningless until submission. Only list submitted manuscripts that are actually submitted (including a  manuscript number is helpful). True story: when I had a phone interview for an industrial position, my interviewer was using the CV I had originally submitted 3-4 months before the interview. I was asked for updates on everything not listed as published, including manuscripts listed as in prep, submitted, and in press. Since I had only listed things that were actually in the state I listed them, I was able to tell my interviewer that my "in preps" were submitted and update on the status of my submitted and in press manuscripts.
 
Please DON'T list random local talks (group meetings, practice talks, talks required for your program, etc) as presentations. This does not make you look in demand, it makes you look like you think your CV is not impressive enough. Talks will come as you get more experience. DO list poster presentations at conferences--these count. Subbing for a lecture in class belongs in teaching, not presentations. Some people list interview talks. I didn't, but I can see the argument either way.

Too much random stuff obscures the real meat. One CV I saw recently had a peer reviewed publication in a fairly well-known journal buried under a whole bunch of things written for things like the local school paper and random newsletters. Also, time marches on. In my opinion, as you age, you need to remove things from previous stages. If you have a Bachelor's degree, remove everything pre-high school. If you have a PhD, remove everything pre-University. For academics, everything from University on usually stays. For non-academic positions, space is at a premium, since page limits are a thing. Keep details on the most recent, then just list previous experiences with place and date to save space.

3. Keep fluff to a minimum
In the American context, people don't usually put hobbies and family status on CVs. If you do list hobbies, don't lie about them to sound cool (yes, this happens--you don't want to go into an interview listing martial arts as a hobby and then be unable to name one). You do need to be prepared to discuss anything you put on your CV, since interviewers will often pick something that sounds interesting as a conversation starter.

Transferring money from students to billionaires

While the new tax bill covers many things, Inside Higher Ed has a look at how this might impact students (more discussion here). There are two main concerns here, from my perspective. The first worrisome part is that the tax plan will end student loan interest deductions, greatly increasing the costs of higher education, especially given how rapidly education debt has been rising. This, of course, will disproportionately impact lower income students who need to take on more debt. Furthermore, adding to the cost of loans will make important but low paying jobs (that mean no rapid loan repayment) requiring high education such as teacher, social worker, or librarian that much less attractive.

Even more relevant to most readers of this blog, the new tax bill proposes to make tuition wavers taxable. According to the Inside Higher Ed article:

The proposal would also eliminate a provision of the tax code used by many universities to waive the cost of tuition for graduate students filling positions like teaching assistantships. If the proposal were to go through, those institutions wouldn't be able to waive tuition costs without imposing new taxable income on grad students, said Steven Bloom, director of government relations at the American Council on Education.

OK. So we will take students making stipends of $25-30k and then tax them as if they were making $60-75k. That would bump people up from the 15% bracket to the 25% bracket on money they don't even see,. Given that many US students already have debt from undergrad, it is hard to see how this wouldn't greatly reduce the number of students able to attend grad school, especially when combined with removing the tax deduction on student loan interest. Now, I know that there are people who think we should reduce the number of grad students in STEM fields, but do we really want to cull the numbers with an economic means test?

This seems like a really strange proposal. For one thing, how much money can taxing grad school tuition wavers actually bring in? For another, why wouldn't grad schools drastically lower tuition in the programs that routinely provide such wavers, since it seems mostly like a bookkeeping fiction anyways? Its not like some programs don't have higher tuition than others already, and plenty of programs already have different tuition rates for students before and after they pass to PhD candidates.

True professor confession: I don't like hosting seminar speakers

I know we are supposed to be happy about hosting. We get to invite someone we really want to bring in, we get to spend extra time with them, and enjoy a meal with them on ProdigalU. But the truth is, I really don't like hosting. I can do all those things (except pick the speaker) when someone else hosts, and then I don't have to harangue my colleagues into signing up to fill the schedule, make sure all the proper arrangements have been made, do the introduction (which I find awkward), or deal with any random logistical nightmares that occur. I realize this makes me a freeloader, and that I should do my share for the department. But I definitely don't enjoy it.

Anyone else have something to confess?