CV roundup

The CV workshop was a mixed success. The grad students who had been most excited about it couldn't be there because of a family medical emergency, and she always contributes a lot of life to the meetings. Another grad student just left for a three month research trip to Asia. So the attendees were:

Frazzled female grad student, who's preparing for comps and looks contemptuously at anyone who tries to distract her from her current work

Ignored (by her lab) female grad student from a nearby lab, who also is facing her comps

The senior professor who sometimes joins our meetings who is an absolute grant/publishing dynamo

New male postdoc who had previously done a masters with senior professor


I brought five CVs that all had very different formats. Three were from within our department: a PhD student applying for a postdoc and two postdocs who had just received TT jobs (including mine). A third postdoc applying for TT jobs and a new assistant professor's CV rounded out the bunch. I also had copies of NSF and NIH-grant format CVs from both myself and the senior professor, but no one was particularly interested in grant-specific CVs formats.

One thing that I wish I had made clearer to Senior Prof was that this wasn't an "applying for a job" workshop. Senior prof has a very strong personal point of view -- publications, and to a smaller degree, grants, are all that matter. When he is on a job search committee, he doesn't read whole CVs, he scrolls to the publications and sees where and how much the candidate's been publishing. He also considers the reputation of the letter-writers when deciding whom to put on the short list. And while I would never say that publications weren't the most important factor in almost any application for a research job or research grant/award... that wasn't the message I wanted to send, that it doesn't matter what your CV looks like, it's your pubs, pubs, pubs.

Not every professor is as single-minded on this as Senior Prof (and most professors cannot match Senior Prof's publication rate... the coincidence is notable), and many look at CVs as not just a list of your qualifications, but also an example of how you present and organize information. That message might have gotten drowned out as we lapsed into another episode of "The Phagenista and the Senior Prof Show." Sigh... As a graduate student, lab meetings were called the "Dave, Jeremy and Phagenista Show"... but at least we were all the students!

The visiting student is likely going into science journalism after getting her PhD, and she seemed receptive to my ideas on how to spin many of her previous and current activities (volunteering for AIDS organizations, writing for the local left-wing rag) into sections on her CV. So at least one person got something out of the workshopping. Not uncoincidentally, she also brought her CV with her for us to discuss. The new postdoc said that he would consider putting his teaching experience on his CV (he never has before). Frazzled female grad student was pretty silent throughout the whole thing.

Next time, and yes there will be a next time, I'll make everyone bring their CV, and I might not invite any senior profs... or invite them for the second part of the meeting... I do think there is a value in looking at the CVs of successful scientists, and seeing that there isn't one "right way" to do things.

And, true to Senior Prof's point, one of the recently-hired CVs we went over has utterly stellar content, but was the most cluttered of all we looked at. Clearly, that postdoc been allocating his time to those many (many) high-impact papers instead of gussying up the CV, and it didn't hurt him (at least three great TT offers)!