About This Resume

An academic CV is distinguished from a resume in that it keeps growing: every paper, course, grant and talk stays on it, and nobody expects it to fit on one page. PhD candidates, postdocs and faculty must show research, teaching, and service records as they are judged by search committees, fellowship panels and grant reviewers who compare files closely. Small slips get noticed.

Search committees usually turn first to publications and where your research is heading, then to teaching and funding, with the weight depending on the kind of school. A research university will read your publication list and grants closely. A teaching-focused college will look harder at the courses you have taught and how you taught them. Order your sections to match.

What to Include

  • Education, newest first, with your dissertation title and advisor
  • Publications grouped by type: peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, work under review and work in preparation
  • Grants, fellowships and awards, with amounts where they help
  • Teaching: courses as instructor of record, as teaching assistant, and guest lectures
  • Conference presentations and invited talks
  • Service: peer reviewing, committees, mentoring and outreach
  • Research skills, languages and references (usually three, with contact details)

Academic CV Sample

Sample resume. The person, employers and contact details are fictional.

Joaquin Estrada-Villa

PhD Candidate, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Manhattan, KS | joaquin.estradavilla@example.com | (555) 011-3398

Summary

PhD candidate studying how farm drainage carries nitrate into rivers, with field and modeling work across three Great Plains watersheds. Defending in May 2027 and applying for tenure-track and postdoctoral positions in water resources engineering.

Experience

Graduate Research Assistant, Bluestem State University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Manhattan, KS 2021 to present

  • Designed and ran a two-year field study of tile drainage at 14 farm sites, with 1,900 water samples analyzed.
  • Built a watershed model in SWAT that links drainage practices to river nitrate loads; results appear in two published papers.
  • Mentored 4 undergraduate researchers, two of whom presented posters at national meetings.

Instructor of Record and Teaching Assistant, Bluestem State University, Manhattan, KS 2022 to 2025

  • Taught Fluid Mechanics as instructor of record in summer 2024 and summer 2025, with 38 students each term.
  • Wrote new lab assignments using low-cost flow sensors, which the department kept for the fall course.
  • Served as teaching assistant for Hydrology (three semesters) and Water Quality Engineering (two semesters).

Education

PhD, Civil and Environmental Engineering (expected May 2027), Bluestem State University, 2027
Dissertation: Tile Drainage and Nitrate Export in Great Plains Watersheds. Advisor: Professor Ruth Okonjo-Hale

MS, Environmental Engineering, Bluestem State University, 2021

BS, Civil Engineering, Big Bend Polytechnic University, 2019

Skills

Field sampling and water chemistry, SWAT and HEC-RAS modeling, R and Python for data analysis, ArcGIS Pro, Stable isotope methods, Grant writing, Spanish (native)

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  • Estrada-Villa, J., and Okonjo-Hale, R. (2026). Drainage timing and nitrate pulses in three Kansas watersheds. Journal of Prairie Hydrology, 18(2), 114-131.
  • Lindahl, M., Estrada-Villa, J., and Okonjo-Hale, R. (2025). Low-cost sensors for field nitrate monitoring. Water Methods Letters, 7, 45-58.

Under Review

  • Estrada-Villa, J., Brandvold, K., and Okonjo-Hale, R. Modeling drainage practice changes at the watershed scale. Submitted to Agricultural Water Research, 2026.

Grants and Fellowships

  • Graduate Research Fellowship, Midlands Water Institute, $36,000 a year, 2022 to 2025
  • Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Bluestem State University, 2026 to 2027
  • Student Research Grant, Plains Society of Hydrologists, $2,500, 2023

Presentations

  • Invited talk, Department of Earth Sciences, Tallgrass University, March 2026
  • Oral presentation, Plains Hydrology Conference, Kansas City, MO, 2025
  • Poster, Water Resources Research Forum, Denver, CO, 2024

Service

  • Peer reviewer, Journal of Prairie Hydrology (four reviews)
  • Graduate student member, department faculty search committee, 2024

References

  • Professor Ruth Okonjo-Hale (advisor), Bluestem State University, ruth.okonjohale@example.com
  • Professor Kjell Brandvold, Bluestem State University, kjell.brandvold@example.com
  • Dr. Mariam Qureshi, Midlands Water Institute, mariam.qureshi@example.com

Tips for Your Academic CV

  • Put your name in bold in every author list and keep your field's citation style throughout, so a reader can see your place among the authors at once.
  • Keep published and unpublished work apart. List work under review and in preparation in their own groups, and keep them out of the published list.
  • Label your teaching roles honestly. Instructor of record, co-instructor and teaching assistant mean different things to a committee, and the difference will come up at the interview.
  • If you are applying outside academia, cut the CV down to a two-page resume that leads with skills and results. A hiring manager in industry will skim for what you can do for their team, and the Resume vs CV guide covers that switch.
  • Update it every term. Adding a talk the week you give it takes a minute, and rebuilding a year of activity before a deadline takes an evening you will not have.
  • Follow US conventions for US jobs: leave off photos, birth dates and marital status, which some other countries expect on a CV.
  • Add page numbers and your name to the header of every page, since CVs get printed, stapled and passed around committee rooms.

Next steps: the resume writing guide covers every section in detail, and the template library has layouts for other fields and career stages.