Hello MedHatters!
Today I wanted to tackle going over a curriculum vitae, or a CV as most people call it. You will need to learn how to “buff” up your CV, and continue to add/tweak it as you progress into each stage in your pre-med and medical career. You will use this as your resume as a physician, physician assistant, or pre-med student at every step in your journey and for every medical or science related job you will apply for.
This post will be a bit link heavy, just because all of these documents are on my google drive.
This used to be such a mystery to me. And to be honest, I used my resume for a very long time because it doubled as both my CV and my resume. Big mistake. Mostly because I wanted my resume to stand out, and CV’s are very fact based without much of the frills associated with it. So, here is an edited version of my former resume/CV that I used for a while:
My Old CV. Now, this is several years old. I last updated it while I was in my master’s program (2016-2017) as I was re-applying to medical school. I also wasn’t sure if I would need to apply for a job after obtaining my masters. So a lot of things are out of date, and obviously personal information for myself and others were redacted.
See how beautiful and full of extra frills it is? Great for getting your resume picked/noticed out of a pile of them when applying for jobs, like a regular resume. NOT a good look for a CV.
What is it?
A CV is important this is basically a list of your academic achievements and jobs from the start of your pre-med journey until you basically retire. CV’s are used in science-based careers as a way to showcase all of the work one has done in their field and includes the special skills and talents that you have. It follows everything that you have done for your career, from start to finish.
It is different than a resume however. Some call it a “resume” because everyone knows what a resume is. A resume will usually be shorter, and is solely focused on job experience and what you learned/achieved/pioneered at each job. Yes, there are areas to highlight other skills, but most of the space on a resume is containing what you did at your previous work. You tailor this mostly to fit the job you are applying for (so it may change each time you apply for a new job). You likely won’t keep everything on your resume, because you are trying to highlight certain skills for the particular position you want. With a CV, you usually keep everything. Or most everything.
When you are first starting out (high school, early college), you will end up putting every experience on your resume. That is just how it goes. As a human you haven’t built up enough skills, so every new skill you learn counts as you are entering into the adulting world of jobs. You don’t have enough experience or haven’t worked enough jobs to be able to pick and choose which ones you believe will fit well on your resume either at this point. This will be similar for your CV when you first start out as well.
A CV on the other hand is very field focused. And by field, I mean basically everything in science lol. Usually if you have a CV you are working in some limited subset or certain branches of the sciences. When you first start with your CV, you will have pertinent information from high school and college to help get you into medical school. By the time you are in medical school, you will only keep the more recent things from college or the experiences that you spent a lot of time with on there. The rest will be what you built up in medical school.
As you move on from each stage in your life, you will start to lose the information from your education days and only keep what you’ve learned and done in the field. Or from residency and up. From here you will just tack on everything.
The club I am in charge of this past year has had a CV workshop every fall for the past 3 years. I am using the resources sent to use to give to students for this workshop. So yes, very credible and not like I just pulled it out of thin air.
Most of these resources on the internet are a bit hard to find. I struggled trying to figure out what I should have on my CV before being apart of this club and being able to even look at a decent example of one. IDK why they are so elusive with trying to teach us how to write these. If you’ve happened to work with someone who has been willing to sit down with you and show you how to write a good CV, OR you have been able to find good resources online, great! I would love for ya’ll to share those resources down below in the comments to help each other out.
But here is a guide to writing resumes & CV’s.
REcommendations
I still recommend you have someone either in the field or whose specific job it is to look at CV’s and resumes review yours. Whether you take part in Joplin-MAOPS’s CV clinics where professors and professionals help you with your CV, or you seek it out with a professional service. Sometimes your undergraduate professors or career counselors are willing to help. I think this is the most invaluable way to help your CV.
Hopefully MAOPS keeps this clinic running after I leave. I found it super helpful and I know a lot of other students did as well!
Breakdown of a CV
Just like a resume, your CV needs to have your name and contact information on it and be in a very easily noticeable and accessible spot. So usually the top of the first page. For those of you that may not realize why this is important, if an employer or lab you want to volunteer with or physician you are trying to get to write you a letter of rec doesn’t have a name that they can easily find (or a name at all), they aren’t going to waste their time. This means no potential job, no potential opportunity to work in that lab, and definitely no letter of rec. They will usually just throw it out. Because there is no way of knowing who you are and how to contact you. Although, if you are asking for a letter of rec from someone you know, they likely don’t need it. But still.
In general, the next best header to use is education. Put your most recent first, even if you haven’t graduated yet. And if you are a medical student, MAKE SURE YOU PUT YOU ARE A CANDIDATE FOR THIS DEGREE OR A CURRENT STUDENT. Because we are dealing with a doctor of osteopathic or allopathic degree, you need to make sure you aren’t lying and saying you are a doctor before you are. This can get you in a lot of trouble. Sometimes just showing that the graduation year hasn’t occurred yet isn’t enough…
Since I attended KCU for both my master’s of science education & currently for my DO education, I broke them into 2. You can keep them as one group though.
There are a lot of other headers on this example CV that I have. You will need to remove headers that don’t apply to you and potentially add some that fit into your journey for the time being. So, if you are a sophomore in undergrad, you won’t need board scores. You likely won’t have any invited lecturers/presentations or publications yet. If you do, again, great! If you just recently started your journey or haven’t been able to beef it up much in awhile, showcase things like recent volunteer work on your CV.
I never went down the road of research and publications because I really dislike it. Which, I have not been shy about stating before. This area of my CV is severely lacking and so I don’t keep it in.
Example CV. I suggest keeping a copy of this original example somewhere, and then either creating your own or making a copy of it and turning it into your own. You may not need all of these headers right now, right this second. But if you are like me, you’ll forget what other headers there might be. You’ll want it as a reference when you start adding other experience to yours as time goes on!
Also this is a very basic template. It is meant to be filled out by you. If you want more examples, when you are on your search engine type in “science CV”. The science part is important, as it will bring up more examples similar to those in the field you want to work in. Again, disregard any that have fancy frills, pictures, etc. I’ve been told by one of my professors (PhD in biochem) that if he sees anything like that, he isn’t interested in looking at the CV. He stated he wanted to see your experience and accomplishments for what they are.
Do’s and Dont’s
The last bit of advice I have to pass on is some do’s and don’ts. Most of it will be in the form of another linked document to my drive.
But if you are tired of clicking on so many links, there is the quick version of it:
- It’s okay for your CV to be long. In fact, the longer it is, it means you’ve had more experience because it is a running list. Don’t worry about feeling bad if you don’t have a ton, you are likely just starting out!
- Yes, you can always edit your CV for a specific job you want. Make sure you keep that information though so you can put it back into your regular CV.
- Chronological order is a must.
- Use active verbs! And keep things concise.
- Again, if using this during undergrad, tailor it for that. If using while in medical school, make sure you are only using medical school and up. Unless you did something for majority of your undergrad or it is a related experience, you shouldn’t need it once you are in medical school.
- If you find that you have had several similar experiences/jobs, you don’t need to go into every detail of what you did. Explain those details under the first job/experience, then only have 1-2 sentences for the remainder of your similar experiences.
I hope this was helpful to ya’ll. Cheers!
