Transforming Your CV to a Resume

Transforming Your

CV to a Resume

Transforming Your CV to a Resume 2

Where do I start?

Ensure your CV has all the up-to-date academic

activities and accomplishments you have accumulated

since college. This will serve as your master CV.

You can develop industry or role-specic resumes by

taking relevant elements out of your master CV and

modifying them. This step-by-step guide help you

build and format a strategic and targeted resume

highlighting your relevant experiences and skills to a

specic career beyond academia.

How do I covert my CV to resume?

Always start with a job you are planning to apply to.

Thoroughly review the job description to identify which

transferable skills and experiences are considered

more important than others.

Once you have a list of core skills and experiences for

the position, consider and write down the relevant

knowledge and skills you’ve gained through your

training (e.g., research, teaching, fellowships). Don't

forget to consider your volunteering work (e.g.,

graduate student group engagement, mentoring

undergraduates, services to your department), and

any freelance work you may have involved within or

outside of academia.

Once you have compiled this information, ask

yourself how you achieved success in your work and

what specic tools you used to reach your goals.

These questions will help you develop impactful

accomplishment statements from your experiences.

This process will be covered in more detail throughout

this guide.

What do I include in my resume?

Skills: During your graduate career, you develop

valuable transferable skills that build upon research or

teaching. Examples include collaborating with peers

and identifying emerging trends/patterns from data

to offer evidence-informed insights for improvement.

These may also include specic equipment, software or

capabilities used within each experience such as SAS,

Python, R, and Illustrator.

Accomplishment Statements: These are

impactful descriptions conveying your skills and

accomplishments under each of your most relevant

experiences. Start with an action verb. You should

qualify and quantify your achievements in each of

your accomplishment statements. Highlight your most

relevant transferable skills in your accomplishment

statements in a way that a hiring manager can easily

understand.

Relevant Experience: This section includes full-time

or part-time employment, volunteering, extracurricular

activities, teaching, research and/or eld experiences.

Names and locations of employers and dates of

employment should be included. Create a bulleted list

of accomplishment statements detailing the level of

responsibility, knowledge and acquired skills relevant

to the position to which you are planning to apply

Headings: Create specic headings to break down

your experiences by functional area. Examples include:

Archival Research, Lab Management Experience,

Leadership Experience, Teaching Experience or

Technical Skills.

Step 1: Identify Key Transferable Skills

Graduate students develop transferrable and technical skills throughout their Princeton experience. Whether

it’s through teaching, research/eld work, campus engagement, some of the skills graduate students may

develop during their training may include:

• Data analysis and interpretation

• Abstract reasoning

• Research

• Project management

• Synthesis of ideas, data or existing literature

• Communication (verbal and written)

• Self-management, initiative and motivation

• Ability to express complex information

• Collaboration and leadership skills

• Critical thinking/problem solving

See the next page for some examples of more specic skills you may have developed during your academic career.

Transforming Your CV to a Resume 3

Data analysis and interpretation Research

Dene a problem and identify possible causes Identify sources of information applicable to a problem

or situation

Consolidate or synthesize large amounts of information

into a coherent argument

Design qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-method

research and analyze the data

Identify emerging trends and offer evidence-informed

insights for improvement

Develop organizing principles to sort and evaluate data

Self-Management and Work Ethic Collaboration and Leadership Skills

Work effectively under pressure and meet deadlines Motivate, train and coach individuals to accomplish

learning goals

Consider the impacts of my actions on the broader

community and make responsible decisions

Identify and apply the strengths of others to maximize

team outcomes while achieving a common goal

Be resourceful and build an effective line of

communication with your adviser

Build relationships with others to collaborate, share

resources and brainstorm ideas

Communication Program Management and Organization

Effectively facilitate group discussions by keeping them

constructive

Manage and categorize large assortments of

information and data

Write and edit in forms ranging from brief abstracts to

book-length manuscripts

Identify goals and tasks to be accomplished in a

realistic timeline

Articulate ideas, presentations and ndings to a wide

variety of audiences under time constraints

Prioritize tasks while maintaining exibility to address

potential and unexpected problems

Transforming Your CV to a Resume 4

Identify Key Transferable Skills – Worksheet

Based on a thorough review of the job description of your interest, list your top relevant transferable skills in the

far left column and then note the context(s) in which you demonstrated each skill. These can be brief. Although the

example below illustrates a skill that has been used in all three types of contexts, some of your specic skills may have

only been used in one or two different settings.

Key Transferable Skills Outside Graduate School Research & Teaching Campus Activity

Public speaking End of summer

presentation to

department staff at

organization A where I

interned

Conference

presentations to share

my dissertation ndings

for researchers and

faculty members

Proposal for graduate

student leadership council

Transforming Your CV to a Resume 5

Step 2: Create Accomplishment Statements

Writing concisely about your experiences and skills in

the limited space on a resume can be challenging. To

write effective accomplishment statements, start with

an Action Verb, then provide the Context for that action

using quantitative and qualitative terms and share the

End Result of your actions to show the value of your

contributions. Examples of accomplishment statements

by skill include:

Writing and Planning

• Planned and implemented each phase of research,

including experiment design, data collection and

analysis, and written reporting of ndings

• Co-authored 5 articles published in peer-reviewed

journals such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry

• Developed technical reports to disseminate

preliminary ndings of a research project

examining the impacts of political culture on

women's political socialization

Collaboration and Leadership Skills

• Lead 3 undergraduate researchers to complete

project goals on time and within budget for

developing an effective treatment technology

• Collaborate with several postdoctoral researchers

and graduate students to develop and submit a

proposal for a community-building research grant

• Oversee budget and manage programming and

events to raise awareness about equity issues on

campus

Research, Interpretation and Analysis:

• Analyze a secondary data set of 200,000+ U.S.

immigrants to identify historical immigration trends

• Conducted 3 longitudinal research projects from

design to completion in 4.5 years

• Design lab protocol and revise approaches during

genetic proteins in senior research projects

Communication Skills

• Managed and mentored 2 undergraduate

researchers in senior research projects

• Presented research at multiple conferences to

share primary ndings with fellow researchers and

faculty members

Converting research “jargon” to accomplishment statements

It is important to be able to effectively communicate your skills and experiences to readers who may not possess

a similar academic background and may not be familiar with eld-specic jargon. Consider the example below:

Scientic accomplishment statements:

Department of Physics, Princeton University September 2016 - Present

• Derive the long-time diffusion coefcient in disordered systems with trapping and releasing mechanisms

• Predict permeability of random media by their tomographic information

Alternative statements for less scientic readers:

Department of Physics, Princeton University September 2016 2016 - Present

• Independently assess mathematical models to conceptualize and evaluate trapping and releasing

mechanisms

• Apply technical tools to hypothesized outcomes related to random media

Transforming Your CV to a Resume 6

Create Accomplishment Statements - Worksheet

List your top 5-10 skills in the left column, then note the context where you demonstrated each skill.

See sample action verbs in the Additional Resources section on pages 9 & 10 for assistance.

Action Verb Context End Result

Authored 5+ articles on the correlation

between atoms and perception

of physical spaces

Published in the Summer 2019

IEEE Journal

Transforming Your CV to a Resume 7

Step 3: Format Experiences

Now put it all together and add your employer, location, position and employment timeframe. Here are a few examples

that contain these elements:

Research Experience

Princeton University, Engineering and Applied Sciences, Princeton, NJ | 2015 - Present

Graduate Researcher

• Develop protein binding interactions involved in the signaling pathway of apoptosis

• Conduct extensive literature reviews of patent and scientic trends

• Analyze innovative binding interactions involving apoptosis to better understand cellular lifecycles

Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. | September 2017 - May 2018

Brookings Research Fellow

• Awarded rst pre-doctoral fellowship for dissertation research granted by the Metropolitan Policy Program

• Created a dataset compiled from government sources on municipal nances and socioeconomics for sub-committee

on nance

• Programmed rare-events regressions to measure the impact of scal control boards in small cities

• Performed qualitative case studies on the control boards of Miami and Washington, D.C. through interviews with key

actors, archival research, and evaluating nancial reports

• Presented at 2 national academic conferences for Political Science (7,200 attendees) and Planning (1,000 attendees)

Teaching Experience

Princeton University, Department of History, Princeton, NJ | September 2015 - Present

Teaching Assistant

• Conduct study sessions, facilitate discussions and contribute to curriculum design

• Teach philosophy and history of science to over 70 students

Medical Communication Experience

The Merck Index, Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ | June 2016 - August 2016

Associate Editor

• Wrote original scientic monographs for The Merck Index using a broad scientic background in chemistry and

biomedical sciences

• Edited the chemical structure content of The Merck Index for publication

• Managed staff of 3 working on editorial projects to write new material, update existing material and to enhance

The Merck Index web and digital versions

• Represented the Merck Publishing Group at national and international scientic and professional meetings,

seminars and exhibits

Leadership Experience

Princeton Graduate Consulting Club, Princeton, NJ | January 2018 - December 2019

Co-President

• Led one of the largest clubs on campus with 12-person executive board and 150+ active members

• Developed strategic partnerships with major consulting rms and alumni to build sustainable talent pipelines

• Co-organized 20+ weekly case-practice sessions and won 2 Ivy case competitions in 2019