Crafting the perfect resume or CV for graduate school can be difficult to accomplish if you don’t have a graduate school resume sample to refer to. To help you construct your own high-quality resume for graduate school, we’re offering you four original resume and CV samples to use as examples.

First, we’ll explore what features make a great graduate school resume. Then, we’ll provide you with our own graduate school resume examples, giving you tips on what to include on your resume and how to showcase your strengths. Finally, we’ll leave you with our picks for the best online resources for graduate school resume and CV samples.

 

What Characteristics Make a Great Graduate School Resume or CV?

One easy way to make your graduate school application stand out is to create a compelling, eye-catching resume. But in order to ensure your resume will be memorable, it must be:

 

Focused

Graduate school resumes should highlight all of your major academic and professional experiences and accomplishments — particularly those most relevant to your field of study. This means you should tailor your resume to your field of study and avoid padding it with too many irrelevant experiences. (That said, some programs may ask you to include your entire professional history, irrelevant positions and all. In this case, don’t leave anything out!)

In addition, don’t go overboard with your descriptions. Each entry (even those that are highly relevant to your field) should only contain as much detail as is necessary without devolving into verbosity. Generally, anywhere from two to four bullet points per entry should suffice.

 

Clear and Easy to Follow

Structure is also an important feature of a graduate school resume. All resumes should include a header with your name and contact info; clearly defined sections with headings; descriptions (usually as bullet points); and page numbers if your resume exceeds one page.

I also recommend arranging your entries in reverse chronological order (most recent to earliest). This way admissions committees will know right away what you’re currently working on as well as what your most recent experiences and accomplishments are.

 

 

Professional

The resume is a professional document and isn’t an opportunity to get overly creative. It’s perfectly OK to customize your resume, just as long as you’re adhering to the basic rules of professionalism: use an easily readable font (such as Calibri, Tahoma, or Times New Roman), stick primarily to black and white, and avoid inserting clip art or any other extraneous shapes and images.

 

Free of Errors

Finally, a great graduate school resume is completely free of errors. This means there are no errors in grammar, punctuation, spelling, or formatting. (You can eliminate the potential for formatting errors by saving your resume as a PDF. Most graduate schools prefer PDFs anyway!)

Moreover, your resume should abide by all of your program’s rules, including page limits, header and footer requirements, etc.

 

 

Graduate School Resume and CV Samples

Now that we know what makes for an excellent graduate school resume and CV, let’s look at a few high-quality samples. Graduate school resume examples are helpful resources because they give us ideas as to how to organize our resumes and what to include on them.

Below, we give you four original graduate school resume and CV samples. Each sample is unique and offers a variety of features you may incorporate into your own resume, if desired.

We’re also giving you one annotated graduate school resume sample and one annotated sample CV for graduate school. These annotated samples each contain notes explaining what features make them strong contenders for graduate school.

 

Graduate School Resume Samples

• Graduate School Resume Sample PDF
• Graduate School Resume Sample Annotated PDF

 

Graduate School CV Samples

• Sample CV for Graduate School PDF
• Sample CV for Graduate School Annotated PDF

 

 

Additional Resources for Graduate School Resume and CV Samples

In addition to the four graduate school resume and CV samples above, there are a ton of resume samples you can access for free online. To find high-quality samples, we recommend going to university websites, specifically university career center webpages, as these are most likely to offer you direct guidance on resume and CV writing.

Before we proceed to the resources, however, note that a majority of the following resume and CV samples are actually job oriented. The major differences between job-oriented resumes and graduate school resumes are the focus and the use of references. Graduate school resumes and CVs typically emphasize education and do not contain any references (since you’re already supplying letters of recommendation).

In spite of these differences, though, you should still be able to use some of the samples below as inspiration for your own graduate school resume or CV.

 

The Best Resources for Additional Grad School Resume Samples

Here are our picks for the best online resources for graduate school resume examples.

 

UPenn

Through its Career Services department, UPenn offers a wide array of resume samples for both those who’ve completed undergrad and those who’ve completed additional graduate education (master’s degrees, Ph.D.s, etc.). Each of the graduate-level resume samples contains detailed commentary on key features and areas that could be improved.

 

Harvard

This PDF focuses on how to write resumes if you’re a current master’s student (but can certainly be used for those applying to graduate school, too). The four samples are on pages 5-8. Each resume contains helpful introductory information explaining the purpose of the resume and how it’s organized.

 

Elon University

This university offers several high-quality resume samples for various career paths, including the arts and humanities, the sciences, education, and business. It also offers a generic graduate school resume sample, which you can use to get a feel for the kinds of sections or topics you might want to incorporate into your own resume.

 

 

The Best Resources for Additional Grad School CV Samples

Here, we give you two top-notch resources for CV samples.

 

UPenn

UPenn’s Career Services department offers a large variety of CV samples in addition to the resume samples listed above. Although all of the CV samples are geared toward employment purposes (they were all submitted by Ph.D. holders), they’re still solid resources you can use as models while crafting your own graduate school CV — especially if you’re entering the science, engineering, or math sectors.

 

University of Illinois

This PDF offers two full-length CV samples and instructions detailing how to write a CV and what to include on it. Note that both CV samples are employment oriented (they both contain references and Ph.D. work); however, you can still use the general layouts of the samples to help you come up with ideas for your own CV.

 

Summary: Graduate School Resume and CV Samples

Most graduate school applicants will need to submit either a resume or a CV along with their graduate school applications. This is the only opportunity you’ll have to summarize all of your academic and professional achievements in a single document.

But how can you ensure your resume or CV will impress admissions committees? Generally speaking, a memorable graduate school resume will be one that’s:

• Focused without straying too far into irrelevant territory
• Clear and easy to follow, with a header, headings, and bullet points
• Professional, with easy-to-read fonts and a basic color scheme
• Free of errors in regard to grammar and formatting

Resume and CV samples can help you figure out how to structure your own resume or CV and give you tips on what kinds of sections and topics to include. We’ve provided you with four original resume and CV samples you can use as references while drafting your own resume or CV for graduate school. For additional samples, try browsing university websites and career center webpages.

Remember, if you can produce a compelling graduate school resume, you’re bound to leave a positive impression on admissions committees! So don’t be tempted to slack off with the resume portion of your application — it could very well be what ultimately entices a school to accept you.

 

 

What’s Next?

In addition to samples, we’ve got a quality collection of graduate school resume and CV templates — and they’re entirely free for you to use!

Need tips on what to include on your resume or CV? Read our expert guides on how to write a graduate school CV and how to write a graduate school resume!

When should you apply to graduate school? What do you need to apply? We answer all of these questions and more in our articles on graduate school requirements and graduate school deadlines.