• Question: what will you need on your CV?

    Asked by anon-222982 to Valerio, Sreejita, Sam, Kate, Anastasia, Adam on 14 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Sreejita Ghosh

      Sreejita Ghosh answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      For a career in Academia (to become a professor in University) I need to show good quality research papers, my ability to get research grants from the highly competitive grant committees. I also need to show how well I have supervised my students and managed my own research, and how capable I am of doing inter-disciplinary research (research between different fields such as computer science with medicine, or computer science with finance) something I am interested in.

    • Photo: Kate Winfield

      Kate Winfield answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      You need to show off your skills, for example, teamwork, communication, leadership, ability to adapt and be flexible, determination and passion. In your early stage of your career you may not have experience in all of these in a job, but you can relate activities to what you do outside of school or things you have taken part in at school. For example, you may play a sport so that shows teamwork. You may belong to a Scout or Guide groups so you can refer to communication and leadership. In your CV it is not all about your grades and what you have studied. It is about what skills you can bring. If a job advert ask for certain skills make sure your CV is tailored to them and make sure you include these keywords. If an employer doesn’t see the skills with examples you will get rejected. On average an employer has 10 seconds or less to look at a CV, so always put what they are after in bold! Just remember that you always have examples of these skills even if you think you don’t!

    • Photo: Anastasia Aliferi

      Anastasia Aliferi answered on 15 Nov 2019:

      I’m not going to say that grades don’t matter, an overall good university score is pretty important if you want to go into research. But what makes you stand out is your involvement and commitment that is visible through the things you do outside the main curriculum. Volunteering can be super fun and it’s a great addition to your CV and same goes for internships and summer jobs. These will make your character stand out, give you something cool to talk about at interviews and can even compensate for a ‘bad’ grade. There are so many skills like teamwork, communication or even being able to stick to a time schedule, that you can get from various activities that might have nothing to do with your studies.

Comments