As mentioned on Twitter, I spent much of yesterday reading and rating a huge number of grant proposals. As such, I’ve looked at a lot of CV’s and resumes, and the contrast is striking. People who work in industry tend to use a resume format that is mostly just a list of jobs and degrees, while academics… well, we do go on.<\/p>\n
“CV” stands for “curriculum vitae” which is Latin for “every damn thing I’ve done in my life.” It’s a much more comprehensive listing than you find on a corporate resume, including not just the important events and publications of a person’s career, but everything<\/em>. Where a resume usually strives to be concise, an academic CV seems to strain to be as long as possible.<\/p>\n By way of illustration, here’s a reasonably up-to-date version of my CV<\/a>, which runs to eight pages, and includes sections on things like committee service and community outreach. And I’m fairly moderate in what I include– I’ve seen some CV’s that I think include a citation for every blog post the person has ever written.<\/p>\n Even as an academic, this strikes me as kind of odd. Several times as I found myself paging down through a couple dozen pages of contributed abstract listings, I wondered what it says about academics that we feel compelled to list every tiny little product of our entire careers. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s terribly flattering.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (My CV could be considerably longer than it is. I simply list courses that I’ve taught by title, where I’ve seen plenty of CVs where people give individual descriptions of every class. I also have a relatively small number of contributed abstracts and posters, which is a result of my slightly odd situation in graduate school. I did my thesis research at NIST, and the local culture didn’t really go in for progress-report posters and the like. If we had results to report, we would submit a talk or poster abstract for the major conferences, but when we were just plugging along with no real results, we didn’t bother (and I didn’t go to the meeting).<\/p>\n (Of course, the flip side of that is that I have a longer-than-typical list of invited presentations, thanks to working for groups at NIST and Yale where the PIs would pass invited talks on to their subordinates. It’s a little unusual to see a CV with more invited than contributed presentations.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As mentioned on Twitter, I spent much of yesterday reading and rating a huge number of grant proposals. As such, I’ve looked at a lot of CV’s and resumes, and the contrast is striking. People who work in industry tend to use a resume format that is mostly just a list of jobs and degrees,… Continue reading What Our CV’s Say About Our Profession<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,139,13,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-culture","category-education","category-jobs","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}