A resume or curriculum vitae (CV) is a summary of your technical skills, extracurricular activities, and academic and professional accomplishments. Your CV serves as the admissions committee’s initial impression of you, therefore it must be carefully created and then carefully reviewed. While creating a resume, there are a few key considerations that must be made, including the content, format, and resume length. Your objective and purpose should be made abundantly obvious in your resume’s content. But, as most applicants do, it is not a good idea to state the purpose at the beginning of the resume. Your objective should reflect in the construction, content and flow of your resume, along with the hierarchy of your qualifications and achievements included in the document.

You must remember that you are one of the few thousand students who will apply to that university, and as a result, the admissions committee will also review small number of your resumes. The admissions committee may just have a few seconds or minutes to review your resume. So, you must make sure that the resume grabs the committee member’s attention within the first few seconds. What matters most is how you make an effort to make your resume stand out from the competition by being more thorough and impressive. See Common Mistakes in a Resume for further details.

You must keep in mind that a resume is not an autobiography and should not be written in that manner as you are creating it. Your CV should be viewed as a thorough and comprehensive reference to your academic background, delivered responsibilities, achievements, and academic and professional skills. Ultimately, the font should be used with the proper size, spacing, alignment, and other factors. Most importantly, there is a standard format that an academic resume follows, which you should keep in mind.

How to Make an Impressive Academic Resume

Understanding and comprehending the purpose of writing this document is essential for developing a successful and impressive resume. It is important for you to realize that it is not an autobiography. Instead, it lists your educational and professional accomplishments and qualifications.

Common Mistakes in a Resume and How to Avoid These

A resume serves as the initial introduction to your qualifications. While it’s important to keep in mind what should be on your resume, it’s also important to have an understanding of the mistakes that are frequently made when creating an academic resume. Students (who have work experience especially) frequently upload the same resume they use when searching for jobs. They must keep in mind that a professional resume/CV and an academic resume are two different things. As a result, when creating their academic resumes, students need to be extremely careful and avoid making these common mistakes.

Guidelines for CV

Along with the right format, the correct formatting, hygiene of the document, US/UK English, action words, and grammar, are the most important aspects of the CV/ resume that you will be submitting to the university.  Even minor design flaws like incorrect bullet alignment or excessive line space can change how a page looks overall. The readability of your manuscript is subsequently impacted by this. Your document loses appeal to the ADCOM as it becomes more lengthy or complex. It is important to convey all of your facts in a clear, concise manner that does not exclude any of your key points.