Internship hunt: It's venting time! - (May/05/2010 )

Personally, when looking to fill a position, I'd be much more impressed by someone interested in the research we do and who asks "have you looked at X possibly being involved in Y"? or some such possibility not already out in the literature. GPA's and experience are great, but they're everywhere. Demonstrate that you can think, and you're in...

I am hoping, acetylcholine has a job by now.....

But HomeBrew, one can do what you suggest, only at an interview. I think the biggest problem, graduates face (i did for almost an year) is not getting to the interview stage. I have seen recruiters skip through large chunks of my CV (2 page long). How would the person know what I have to offer, if he is more interested in his coffee than the CV he is holding?

Quite a few of my friends are stuck in the application stage and do not seem to be moving anywhere.... I am worried....

I'm hoping that AC found a position, too. What happened, girl?

@ gt ameya: have you had a career counselor evaluate your CV? Someone who looks at many CVs per day may be able to offer you suggestions to tweak the layout to make the impressive portions more eye-catching.

lab rat on Tue Oct 19 00:50:22 2010 said:

I visited three-four different counselors at my uni and each suggested changes which the previous one had made. It was quite irritating. They did highly contribute to my covering letter though. But my CV is a truce agreement between those counselors and what I think is right. I am still looking for a very good layout for an academic CV. Something that lets me say what I have done, my skills and my experience in an effective way. Any suggestions????

I made each section of my CV a table with one row and two columns. The first column was the section heading. The second column was a bulleted list of my skills (no more than one line each), work experience, etc. I formatted the table so the internal margins were 0 and the lines were not visible. This way, I could rearrange the sections by dragging and dropping the tables to emphasize sections as I wished.

I suggest using gestalt principles to design the layout to emphasize the content, rather than adding "flair" like symbols or design elements that won't allow easy scanning. Use white space effectively; perhaps make lines 1.25 spacing instead of 1.0 and choose a non-serifed font like Arial. If you make the lines 1.0-1.15, choose a serifed font like Times New Roman. The serifs create a visual line, making the text easier to read. Leave at least two lines after a paragraph to allow the reviewer to write notes on the hard copy. If you still find the text hard to read, you can adjust the kearning (character spacing) to subtly increase the white space within words.

My own CV is in two fonts: the headings standing along the left-hand side are in 16-point Arial Black, while the body text in the right column is in 11-point TNR. I used italics to emphasize position titles and in the publications section for journal names. I used bold text to emphasize my name in a list of authors. On the first page, my name matches the section heading format (albeit larger) while my contact information matches the section body text. I chose to align the paragraphs along the right, rather than selecting justified format. The spacing was too weird, and the tables prevented the right edges from appearing too irregular.

The difference in fonts is indicative of attention to small details. The key is consistency. I include the contact information for my references in my CV file, formatted exactly the same as my CV. My cover letters also match in fonts and spacing. I also looked up a list to find the correct abbreviations of journal names.