Your Vita should say who you are, and emphasize your strengths to a prospective employer.

Take the time to do it right! Your vita should be:

• perfect in spelling and syntax,
• impeccably neat,
• well organized,
• say the essential facts about your professional experience,
• say why a prospective employer should hire you,

Hopefully, it will fit all in one page, or at most two, for what is commonly called the "Short Form CV" or a "Résumé". The point is that the longer the CV, the less likely the reviewer on the Search Committee will see all of your strengths. So, keep it short & sweet.

Later on in your career, you will develop your "Long Form CV" which lists ALL of your professional activities over the years. But not now; now, you just want an employer to have their interest piqued.

The AMS Academic Job Search page begins with a very nice discussion of what you should include in your CV if you are applying for an academic position. There are also many guides concerning what not to say on your CV. For example, here is a useful list of "25 Things You Should Never Include on a Resumé".

Things to take note of

Your CV must be absolutely free of any grammatical and typographical errors. This means use a spell checker!! It is highly recommended that you ask a faculty member to go over your initial version for errors in English and punctuation, and possibly offer suggestions on improving the presentation.

The CV should be written either in TeX (or LaTeX or AMSTeX - and use either 11 or 12pt fonts) or using an advanced word processor such as MicroSoft Word.

Keep the CV free of all abbreviations, and any kind of short-hand notation. (For example, write University of Illinois at Chicago, not UIC.)

Each employer will be looking for different facts about you, so you should ideally have a specialized vita for each type of job you pursue. Listed below are guidelines for three types of positions commonly applied for: research instructorship, teaching assistant professorship, and industrial position.

There are two ways to prepare a Curriculum Vitae in LaTeX or TeX. One is "by hand", and examples of this type of CV are listed below. Alternately, download the LaTeX package moderncv.zip which lets you make "fancy" CV's. The package has examples included - but better is to look at some samples make by MSCS grad students below.

Note there are several versions of the moderncv package available now. The latest is version 0.7, which you can just download here: moderncv version 0.7. The previous version 0.6 may work better with older systems, and is available here: moderncv version 0.6. or check out the CTAN website for moderncv.

The comments on this page are just suggestions, and can (and should) be varied as necessary. The goal is simply, to prepare your most effective Curriculum Vitae.

Typesetting Your CV

There are two ways to prepare a Curriculum Vitae in LaTeX or TeX. One is "by hand", and some examples of this classic style of CV's are listed here, along with the TeX source files.

• Wojciech Florek (General Resume)   PDF & TeX
• Arek Goetz (Postdoc/Teaching Resume)   PDF & TeX
• Joseph Shive (General Resume)   PDF & TeX

• Travis McBride (General Resume)   PDF & TeX
• Yue Yu (General Resume)   PDF & TeX

• moderncv.cls
• moderncvcompatibility.sty
• moderncvthemecasual.sty
• moderncvthemeclassic.sty
• moderncvthemeempty.sty

Research Postdoctoral Positions

1. Have your name at the top, with both Home and Department addresses in single space blocks side-by side underneath. If not US citizen, possibly include visa status. (This is a probably a delicate topic. Check with others about this point.)


2. State your research area, and future research interests. This should be both broadly stated, so the application can be classified by the Search Committee, and also include a more narrow interests, so a reviewer can get a feel for your specialty. (e.g., analysis and geometry; C*-algebras of foliations and their K-theory)


3. Include your education:
   • PhD - title of thesis and advisor; any distinctions.
   • Masters (if any) - date received and from what school.
   • Undergraduate- date of degree and school, and any very special honors (e.g., Putnam Honors).


4. List your distinctions that you want the prospective hiring committee to know about: NSF graduate support, papers written, invited seminar talks, invited talks at AMS special sessions, etc.


5. List any special training or research/industrial experience that would make your case more attractive: computer experience & ability to teach computer courses, summer research experience in research or industrial environment, etc.


6. If you have publications, or papers written and submitted to a journal for publication, list these on the vita if at all possible. These make an excellent last item for the vita.


7. Keep the whole vita to one page or two pages if possible, without making it too crowded. If you have talks and some papers to list, two pages will likely be required. If it takes more than than that, you probably said too much.

Teaching Positions

This is the kind of job where the expectations primarily concern your teaching abilities, although they may also be interested in your research talents, with the degree of each depending upon the type of school you are applying to.

1. Have your name at the top, with both Home and Department addresses in single space blocks side-by side underneath. If not US citizen, possibly include visa status. (This is a probably a delicate topic. Check with others about this point.)


2. State your career goals and the type of teaching position you seek: for example
   • What sort of classes for you love to teach?
   • Do you plan to continue some research, or to just teach?
   • Are you motivated to help develop curriculum, or have other goals that would build their department?


3. Include your education:
   • PhD - title of thesis and advisor; any distinctions.
   • Masters (if any) - date received and from what school.
   • Undergraduate- date of degree and school, and any very special honors (e.g., Putnam Honors).


4. List your distinctions that you want the prospective hiring committee to know about. A hiring committee deciding on a candidate for a position, where teaching is the main objective, will have a totally different emphasis on what they seek in a prospective candidate than for a candidate for a pure research position. It is fundamentally important to emphasize your teaching ability as best as possible. So possibly list special courses taught while a graduate student (e.g., ESP experience, or that you taught your own course). This is where you can include teaching evaluations from when you were a TA, or if you taught a class, from that class. (Of course, only if they were good! "Best foot forward" always.) Especially, if you won honors for excellence in teaching, then mention this prominently. Of course, you can also include mention of any academic honors, such as NSF graduate support, papers written, invited seminar talks or talks at AMS special sessions.


5. List any special training or research/industrial experience that would make your case more attractive: computer experience & ability to teach computer courses, summer research experience in research or industrial environment, experience conducting tutorials, etc. It may even be desirable to list any courses you have taught which indicate experience and your ability to successfully conduct a class on your own.


6. If you are applying to a small, four year college, they often are interested in who you are as a person, for you will be joining their faculty as someone they will be friends with, or at least colleagues with, for years to come. It can be helpful to include some extra personal data to let them know something interesting about you, that will attract their interest (over the many other candidates). Personal data is not required, and its inclusion is again a tricky matter. The idea is to create a favorable portrait of what you might be like as a colleague. Possible items to consider listing are: hobbies, community service, volunteer work, membership in a local orchestra, and so forth.


7. Keep the whole vita to one or two pages if possible. Of course, if you list all your courses taught, it is hard to keep the length to two pages. But when you prepare your Teaching Portfolio, there you can list every single teaching activity, and include the evaluations.


8. It is also probably a very good idea to remove your facebook page, or at least sanitize it so that its appearance is totally professional. These days, it is way too easy to find any such pages with google, and learn things about you that you didn't mean to share with an employer. Too bad.

Industrial Positions

The requirements of an industrial position can vary as widely as there are firms. There is only one golden rule: make sure the vita looks professional.

1. Have your name at the top, with both Home and Department addresses in single space blocks side-by side underneath. If not US citizen, possibly include visa status. (This is a probably a delicate topic. Check with others about this point.)


2. State the type of position you seek, and your career goals.


3. Include your education, beginning with the most advanced degree:
   • PhD - title of thesis and advisor; any distinctions.
   • Masters (if any) - date received and from what school.
   • Undergraduate- date of degree and school, and any very special honors (e.g., Putnam Honors, first in class, etc.).


4. List your distinctions that you want the prospective hiring committee to know. The distinctions that matter for an industrial job can be much different than for an academic job. For example, they may not even know about the Putnam Exam. So judge this item by trying to get a feel for the firms where you are applying. If you have a company in mind, use the web to research them!


5. List any special training or research/industrial experience that would make your case more attractive. For example, describe any hands-on computer experience you have - designing software, projects, and so forth.


6. It can be helpful to include some extra personal data to let them know something interesting about you that will attract their interest: e.g., your hobbies, community service, volunteer work, and so forth. On the other hand, this information is strictly optional, and should not cause the vita to deviate from the main maxim: look professional. Also, be prepared to discuss any item on your CV with an interviewer (yea! you got in the door).


7. Keep the whole vita to one page. The rule of thumb for an industrial vita is 1 page for each 10 years of experience. This gives you at most one page for your vita.


8. It is also probably a very good idea to remove your facebook page, or at least sanitize it so that its appearance is totally professional. These days, it is way too easy to find any such pages with google, and learn things about you that you didn't mean to share with an employer. Too bad.


9. On the other hand, you might replace your facebook page with a LinkedIn networking page. Lots of your fellow grad students are networked on this Business Community site. Perhaps it is somewhat like the modern Chamber of Commerce for the iGeneration.