What About Your CV

The first thing you’re going to want to do is check with each school you’re applying for to see if they have specific information, or a specific structure they want you to use on the CV.

Slide 1: CV

All right. So let's get started with the CV, which is really just another word for resume. So the first thing you're going to want to do is check with each school you're applying for to see if they have specific information, or a specific structure they want you to use on the CV. 

Slide 2: CV Structure

  • Section 1 – Basic Info: name, address, email, phone, DOB
  • Section 2 – Education: school name and address, graduation date, years of study, type of diploma, GPA (optional), academic awards
  • Section 3 – Work Experience: name of company, city and state, period, position, responsibilities
  • Section 4 – Additional Relevant Experiences/Skills

If not, there are three sections that are very standard, and a fourth that you can toy with a little bit. So section 1 is very easy, basic information. It's your name, your address, an email address that you check frequently, your phone number, and your date of birth. The next section, you're going to put your education information. So that's going to be your school name and address, your graduation date, the years that you studied there. So if it's, you know, a private school and you've been there since first grade, put 2000 or whatever to your year of graduation. If it's a high school, and you were just there for high school, you put those four years. 

Type of diploma, this would be you either say American high school diploma, or you say International Baccalaureate. Those are probably the only two you'll be putting on there. If your GPA is good, put it here, but it's not required. So if it's sort of questionable — I would say if it's 3.0 and over, put it on. Otherwise, don't. And this is also where you put any academic awards that you've received, any school-related awards. 

The third section is your work experience. If you don't have paid work experience, you could put volunteer work here as well. But you're going to put, you know, the name of the company, the city and the state, when you worked there, what the position was, and your responsibilities. 

And now, the fourth section is something that — it’s sort of like an “other” section, and you can name it what you want. I like the heading “Additional Relevant Experience and Skills” because that can incorporate a lot. But the only things you want to put here are relevant experiences and skills. Because we don't want this to be a four page document, you know? So this would be where we would put things from — from our example we would put things like the program he did in Morocco, or that he taught himself Arabic, or Concordia Language Villages. We wouldn't be putting stuff about travel with family. Even though that's relevant, it's not appropriate for a CV. We wouldn't be putting on video games, certainly. We already knew that. We wouldn't be putting, you know, the physical exertion stuff. That's just not relevant. 

Slide 3: CV Tips

  • Check if the school you are applying to has a recommended structure
  • Try to limit to 1 page – no more than 2
  • Clear layout with headings and bullet points

So a few tips. Try to limit it to one page. I mean, that's — really, it shouldn't be try. Really limit it to one page. You want it to be clear. You know, you can go on Pages, or Google Docs, or Microsoft Word, and you're going to see structures already set up where you can just plug stuff in. Find a really clean-looking one. It doesn't have to be fancy. You want it to be clean-looking and professional so somebody can look at it — you know, with bullet points and all that, and headings. They can look at it and see exactly what it is that you want them to see; the things that you're trying to highlight. 

So yeah, clear layout, limit it to one page. Make sure all that information is included, and you are good to go. You just create your format, and plug in the information from the last activity. 

Next lesson, we will be talking about the motivation letter.