CV questions continued
I'm looking at the Burroughs-Wellcome Making the Right Moves handbook and just noticed a couple of things contrary to what I've been told before.
1. Include teaching interests on your CV. Is this true? It's news to me.
2. List manuscripts in preparation under a separate category. Really? I've heard a lot of debate about whether to list them at all, but I've always seen them listed along with everything else.
3. Do not include posters exhibited at scientific meetings.
Aha! See, posters don't count! In other words, at least to the people who published this handbook, posters are to people who get jobs as Trix are to the silly rabbit.
Or is that only for the Burroughs-Wellcome elite?
The rest of the proletariat should list posters because we don't have much else to show for ourselves, eh?
posted by Ms.PhD @ 10:19 AM
13 comments
13 Comments:
1) I would not include teaching interests in a standard CV, but I would include a section on teaching experience and philosophy in any form of tenure track job application or anything for departmental evaluation -- wether it is asked for or not.
2) Items 'in preparation' can often come back to haunt you. Only include items here where there is an almost complete manuscript that is waiting for final edits. Too many on the go projects that are really just ideas make you look like academically immature.
3) Of course you should include posters if they are important in your research area. Sometimes they count, sometimes they don't.
people make up their own CV rules all the time. just look at burroughs-wellcome...
people list posters all the time. what, they're not peer-reviewed, you say? doesn't stop people from lumping all their abstracts and manuscripts (in progress) under "publications". bah.
My 0.02, from the social sciences:
1. No, not on a CV. Perhaps discuss in a cover letter if teaching has been mentioned as a priority in the ad.
2. No, not on a CV. Discuss current projects briefly in a cover letter.
3. If you're relatively junior and don't have a gazillion pubs and conference papers -- yes, list them. Just put them in a different section or be sure no one will accuse you of trying to pass off a poster as a paper.
I recently obtained a tenure track job in a hard science. So I will give you my anecdotal experience.
1. I did not include teaching interests on my CV. This was a separate document that was requested.
2. I listed my manuscripts submitted/in preperation as a separate category. I think it helped my case by being able to notify the search committee that two of those were accepted.
3. I included all of my abstracts presented at scientific meetings, both posters and presentations. I also included an award I won for one of my posters. I also listed all of the scientific meetings I had attended as I thought it showed my desire to stay current and engaged in the most recent research as well as an attempt to meet potential collaborators.
List posters, talks and published abstracts in a separate section such as 'external presentations'. Really suggest you don't list papers 'in prep' as it makes you look desperate. Even 'submitted' has to be used with caution. Very common to get CVs with papers listed as 'submitted to PNAS' or something similar and it's just laughable cos you suspect that 48 hours later they'll be 'submitted to FASEB J'.
anon, what would an "easy science" job be? I'd like to get in on that.
"Very common to get CVs with papers listed as 'submitted to PNAS' or something similar and it's just laughable cos you suspect that 48 hours later they'll be 'submitted to FASEB J'."
For that reason, if you are going to list submitted papers, it is polite to list them without specifying the journal to which they have been submitted. Only list the journal if the paper has been accepted and is therefore "in press" (and these should definitely be listed on your CV).
I'd like to know what the perceived difference between FASEBJ and PNAS is. I tend to think of them as more or less equivalent and have a paper in each one.
whoa, someone has a publication in FASEBJ.
The BW guidelines are very good. I would follow them, especially as they are written largely for a life sciences audience, and written by people who have looked at a lot of CVs.
Not listing your teaching interests won't kill you, but it gives the search committee more information about you, right away. Even if the job is at a medical school or research institute, youmay need to teach something, sometime.
Having manuscripts in prep as a separate section is also a good idea, if you will include them at all. Be very selective, as another poster suggested, and onlyput something down if you have pages written and a few figures assembled.
As for posters, well, yeah, sorry, but don't include them. Lots of epople give lots of posters, but 100 posters do not carry the wieght of one publication, they just take up more space on a piece of paper.
This does not mean that giving a poster us a useless waste of time. I actually enjoy it very much because it allows more face time with people who are very inerested in the work, and all your data are right there so you can easily refer to them in conversation. It sucks that most pople are just there for the wine and cheese, but I've spent many a poster session glued to my poster with a constant trickle of one or two interested people who engage me in long conversations. I get a lot out of it most of the time. My old boss used to complain when one of us got a poster because, in her mind, every little experiment we did "deserved to be in a talk". THis kind of attitude contributes to the idea that giving a poster is somehow punitive or that poster presenters are second class citizens. If you go into it that way, it can make the meeting suck. But ti doesn't have to.
Still, don't list posters on your CV. If you want you can list invited presentations.
Oh, and I should also add that I've been on search committees and have looked at a lot of CVs. When you're trying to figure out which six people to invite from the box of 300 applications, an information-dense CV with the important stuff up front is very helpful.
Some universities have standards for CVs. The UC system does. You have to separate abstracts from peer-reviewed papers from review papers. (I ding people who put review papers on NIH biosketches that asks for peer-reviewed papers only). For NIH review its ok for a grad student to have posters on their biosketch. But not at the post-doc level. Good post-docs publish at least 1 first author and several non -first author papers a year. And then there are the overachievers....
When you get evaluated at UCLA, most people look at your journals and pull out the impact factor scores. That's all they go on.
Regarding posters: my wife did her PhD in a field where getting posters accepted at the National Society Big Annual Meeting was very competitive. There's a big difference between her putting them on her (already lengthy) CV and my putting rubber-stamped posters on mine.
Still, once you're a postdoc it starts to look desperate. Talks, though, I'd definitely include on the CV.
I'm not in life sciences but this is what I did:
I had a separate teaching statement which also listed class I had taught with evaluations where available.
It is worth having a section of Peer Reviewed publications in preparation, but it is only worth listing the ones you have written and submitted. Definitely included any that have been accepted but not published yet. Put (in press) after the journal name.
For posters, if the abstracts are peer reviewed in anyway, you should include them giving the name, date and place of meeting.
If you are interested I would be happy to send you a copy of my academic CV. I think you can see my email, so just drop me a message and I will forward it to you.
Good luck.
Post a Comment
<< Home