Once you’ve decided to expand your knowledge and skills by going to graduate school to earn a Master’s Degree or PhD, you should do get your graduate school resume in order. This isn’t the same type of resume used for job applications. The school will want to make sure that you can handle the advanced lessons and courses. Your graduate school resume, or CV, can help provide them with this information and make your case for you.



What Is A Grad School Resume?

When you send in your entrance application to a college or university graduate program, you should include a resume. This resume gives you with the opportunity to provide the admissions committee with more information about you than you furnish in the application. This resume also puts the focus on exactly what the admissions committee needs to know in order to decide if you would be a good candidate for the program. A graduate school resume is designed to enhance your admission application and increase your chances of approval, whereas a job search resume’s main goal is to get you an interview. What Should Your Graduate School Resume Include?

Resume Help Guidelines

When building your graduate school resume there are a few guidelines you should follow:

• Don’t use a summary or objective statement; instead include a personal statement that states exactly what you want to accomplish in your career.
• Separate your work and non-work experiences into different sections.
• Include all types of experiences in the field you want to study, not just job experiences. Also indicate how much time and effort you’ve dedicated to these situations, both work and non-work activities.
• Your previous work experience should relate to your personal statement. The intention is to sell yourself.
• You can extend your resume to two pages, but make sure your contact information is on each page.
• Include general information about your previous education, but don’t take up too much space as details are already provided in your transcripts.

And just like with any professional documentation, your graduate school resume should have crisp language full of action verbs that describe your experiences, a clean layout with a lot of white space so it is easy to read, and it should be error-free. Finally, your CV or graduate school resume shouldn’t look like everyone else's. You want it to stand out and be noticed so that the school will accept you into their program.

You always want to make a great first impression when applying for graduate school. When your application includes a graduate resume or CV, you are showing the admissions department that you understand the culture and environment of graduate school, and this, in turn, makes you look like a serious applicant determined to work hard for the degree.