Prepare your graduate school resume (some call it a graduate school CV) once you've decided to expand your knowledge and skills by earning a Master's Degree or PhD. This is a key part of the grad school application process. This is not the conventional job application resume that you might use to target a specific job opportunity. The graduate school wants to make sure that you can handle the advanced lessons and courses. Your graduate school resume, or CV, helps make your case for you.
What Is A Grad School Resume?
A graduate school resume is important when you send in your entrance application to a college or university grad program. The grad school resume allows you to provide the admissions committee with more information than you furnish in the application. It also puts the focus on exactly what the admissions committee needs to know. It is designed to enhance your application, whereas a job search resume’s main goal is to get you a job interview.
Resume Help Guidelines
When building your graduate school resume there are a few guidelines you should follow:
• Avoid a summary or objective statement; instead use a personal statement describing what you want to accomplish in your career.
• Separate your work and non-work experiences into different sections.
• Include all types of experiences in the field you want to study, not just job experiences. Also indicate how much time and effort you’ve dedicated to these situations, both work and non-work activities.
• Your previous work experience should relate to your personal statement. The intention is to sell yourself.
• You can extend your resume to two pages, but make sure your contact information is on each page.
• Include general information about your previous education,
but don’t take up too much space as details are already provided in your
transcripts.
As with any professional documentation, your graduate school
resume should have crisp language full of action verbs that describe your
experiences, a clean layout with a lot of white space so it is easy to read,
and it should be error-free. Finally, your CV or graduate school resume
shouldn’t look like everyone else's. You want it to stand out and be noticed so
that the school will accept you into their program.