Turn a Graduate Student CV Into a Resume People Outside Read
Graduate student resume example covering research, teaching and funding, with a guide to cutting an academic CV down to two pages.
Example Graduate Student summary
Fourth-year doctoral researcher in environmental chemistry defending in the spring, with a 26-month field campaign across nine sites and three first-author papers behind it. Runs the shared instrument queue for six researchers, built the lab reproducible analysis pipeline in R, and taught four undergraduate lab sections. Looking for analytical roles in industry or a public agency where method development sits at the center.
Skills to list on a Graduate Student resume
- Research design
- Quantitative analysis
- Statistical modeling in R
- Laboratory instrumentation
- Data management
- Scientific writing
- Peer review
- Grant and fellowship writing
- Conference presenting
- Teaching and mentoring
- Literature review
- Reproducible workflows
- Project scheduling
- Regulatory and safety compliance
What actually gets this resume read
- Decide first whether the reader wants a CV or a resume, because the two documents have opposite rules.
- Put your expected defense or completion date in the top block, since every reader wants to know when you are free.
- Translate research into a project with a scope, a method, a dataset size and a result someone can use.
- Name instruments, software and analysis languages, because those are the lines a hiring lab actually filters on.
- Keep publications to the ones that show the method you want to be hired for, and cut the rest for industry.
- Show funding and awards with the body that granted them, since that is how a committee reads competitiveness.
- Count teaching, mentoring and lab management as management experience, with the number of people involved.