Curriculum Vitae

A curriculum vitae, or cv for short, is a document similar to a resume in that it communicates an employment record, educational credentials and skills sets.

Where the cv differs is in sensibility and purpose. Literally translated, curriculum vitae means the “course of a life,” or “one’s life’s work.” If you search cv online, you’ll find a number of links differentiating the resume and cv based upon length. A cv needs to be longer because the purpose is to present how the individual has, over the course of a career, not only accrued experience, but also amassed/created/produced a body of work. This body of work may be creative, scholarly, and/or practice-based. As a document traditionally connected with and to the academy, the body of work is usually presented in relationship with or to a particular academic field or discipline.

Usually, a resume is a document used when seeking employment. The cv, as one of the more important documents in the academy, is not only used when seeking employment. With a cv, the idea is to communicate how your credentials, awards, experience, creative and scholarly production/practice, and service illustrate who you are as a professional, and how your work contributes to and denotes disciplinary expertise. As a result, the cv is always a part of tenure and promotion processes. It is also often requested as a part of both internal and external grant and award applications. Institutions and academic programs also require it of their faculty for accreditation purposes.

In a traditional academic cv, the document opens with contact information, followed by the dates and locations of degrees, most recent first. Grants and awards are often listed next, followed by academic experience/professional positions. Often, experience listed on a cv corresponds directly to the position, course, or courses for which one has been hired to teach. The cv should also list, by category, your professional scholarly and creative work. These categories appear in a descending order reflecting knowledge and acknowledgement of a hierarchy associated with processes relevant to peer review in the individual’s discipline/field. (Karen Kelsya, aka Dr. Karen, provides a great description of the usual order of information in a traditional academic cv on her website, “The Professor is In.”)

Even so, not everyone will create a cv for the same reasons. And no two cvs ever need be the same. There is no one standard format for a cv. The document will differ somewhat, depending upon the person’s discipline or field. And, in many ways, this is a benefit.

The flexibility of the form of the cv allows one to create subject headings of their own, and to argue, via this document, how they have accrued experience and expertise beyond educational credentials. The cv is an opportunity to present, in list form, who you are as a teacher, thinker, writer, maker, etc.; to argue how you should be understood as a disciplinary mover-and-shaker. This may be over-selling it a bit, but the cv can be seen as a chance to offer a reader an understanding of who you are as a professional with a particular career, not just where and when you’ve worked.

So, now what? It all depends upon your reason for creating the cv in the first place. No matter what, you’ll need to collect all kinds of information and assemble it so people can easily read and understand who you are and what you’re all about. This online article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Creating and Maintaining Your CV,” by Natalie Houston, is seven years old, but it provides an excellent overview of the process of preparing and then writing a cv.

Which reminds me - don’t forget that in addition to content, there are concerns associated with design. In a presentation, “Getting the Academic Job that You Want: Perfecting the CV and Job Letter,” that appears on the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity website, Badia Ahad notes that one of the things you don’t want to do is “overburden the CV with a combination of bullet points, italics and underlining. Pick one (no more than 2).” You may or may not care a great deal about this, and again, it’s all about the reason you’re creating the document in the first place. Let the purpose be your guide: an opportunity to gather your life’s work—if only in alphabetic text—all together in one place.

RESOURCES

In-Person
For an appointment to regarding the creation and/or revision of a cv, email Susan Kerns, skerns@colum.edu.

Online

Academic CV
Elsevier, one of the premier textbook publishing companies, has a blog with a number of resources. The audience here would be primarily assumed to be traditional scholars, but if that’s not how you identify, don’t let that put you off. The general idea here is good. Think about where and how the important work in your field/discipline might work in terms of the suggestions and guidelines offered:

Visual Arts
All of the following links are pulled from the College Art Association’s website. This is the premier professional organization for artists in the academy. They have an excellent set of resources that can help anyone connected with work and experience in the visual arts.

Design
The following links are connected to the “AIGA: Design Educators Community” website. The AIGA is the premier professional organization for design. While their resources aren’t as extensive as those of CAA, there is an interesting two-part series on getting an academic job which provides insight regarding how to create academic documents like the cv.