Assembling Your Curriculum Vitae (CV)

These include academic, professional, extra-curricular, civic engagement, athletics, etc. For each experience, include:

  • Organization Name
  • Location
  • Dates of Involvement
  • Your Title

Now that you have listed your experiences and core details, take time to fully unpack what you actually did in each role.

Resist the urge to summarize broadly. If a responsibility required multiple skills, break it apart. Delineating your work helps you capture the full range of your contributions and prevents you from underselling yourself.

A useful method is to create three short columns for each role:

  • What I did (tasks and responsibilities)
  • How I did it (skills, tools, methods, collaboration)
  • What changed because of it (results, improvements, learning, impact)

Do not worry about phrasing or polish at this stage. Focus on generating detail. You are building raw material that you will refine in the next step. 

In a CV, your goal is to document your academic preparation with clarity and precision. Entries should communicate the scope of your work and relevant methodological or technical details. CV descriptions may be more detailed than resume bullets, particularly for research roles, but they should remain concise and purposeful.

Use the ATOP model: utilize an Action verb + Task/project + the Outcome/ Purpose when developing bullet points. While it’s important to provide enough description to establish context, responsibilities and role, make sure that you focus on achievements and outcomes.

Strong CV descriptions:

  • Specify research subject and goal
  • Identify research methods, tools, or analytical frameworks
  • Clarify your role in collaborative research (if applicable)
  • Specify outcomes such as reports, presentations, publications, grants, contributions to the field, curricular contributions, etc. 

  • Conducted 15 qualitative interviews and thematic analysis for a faculty-led study on climate migration, contributing to a co-authored conference paper. 
  • Designed and implemented a data-cleaning pipeline in Python to support large-scale genomic analysis. 
  • Assisted with archival research and primary source analysis for a book manuscript in modern European history. 
  • Collaborated with a 4-member research team to design and execute a mixed-methods study on consumer adoption of fitness tracking technologies; analyzed survey data to identify adoption drivers and barriers. 

  • Led weekly discussion sections for an introductory sociology course of 60 students, facilitating critical analysis of course materials and debates on topics including social inequality and race and ethnicity. 
  • Designed lesson plans and graded written assignments for an upper-level seminar in constitutional law, covering topics such as separation of powers, civil liberties, and judicial review. 
  • Mentored three undergraduate research assistants in laboratory protocol and data analysis, focusing on PCR techniques, statistical modeling, and experimental design. 
  • Mentored and coordinated a team of high school and undergraduate volunteers for a community-based climate justice initiative, leading workshops on environmental advocacy and organizing local sustainability campaigns.