Building a CV
Your curriculum vitae (CV) is a summary of your training and experiences and will be important for residency applications, future job applications, and will remain a living document for you to build over the course of your training and career. You will continuously be adding to your CV as you develop and will refine and expand this over time.
Why keep your CV up to date?
- You’ll forget things if you don’t add them right away
- It will help to apply for programs, residencies, and any possible opportunities by having this ready to go as needed and can quickly give you a birds eye view of what you’ve done
- Most of this information will be helpful reference when asked about key dates or accomplishments
- You may provide this to any letter-writers at any time for quick reference about your background and accomplishments
The CV can be organized into general categories including the following:
Contact information (name, contact information, email address)
Education (all degrees and training including key dates and degrees, institution and location)
Honors and awards (include title, dates, organization)
Work experience (include title, employer, location, and dates)
Research, list with title of project (include mentor, title, institution, location and dates)
Activities, list the most important activities including committee work, organization projects
Publications, bold your name in the author list, use consistent style of citation throughout
Presentations, include the type of presentation (venue, location, date, and any other relevant details)
Professional memberships (include organization name, membership and/or any leadership positions)
Outside interests - list anything that you’d like others to know about you
General formatting
- Keep a clean and consistent format between sections
- Margins should be at 1 inch
- Font should be no smaller than 11-point
- Use the same font - or no more than two font types for headings
- Make sure to proofread for errors - ask a friend to review
Samples
- Here’s a SAMPLE ACADEMIC CV from Mount Sinai.
- Here are some simple CVs from MD/PhD students who have been kind enough to share theirs: Cindy Tian, Sandhya Chandrasekaran.
- You may also try these: Gallery - Templates, Examples and Articles written in LaTeX