Chapter 6 Your Curriculum Vitae
You’ll write many documents at University, but there is one document that is really important in a potentially life-changing way. Your curriculum vitae9 or resume. An example CV is shown in Figure 6.1.
Figure 6.1: A fictitious example CV using an overleaf template. Would you invite Neil to interview based on his CV? This is what your CV needs to do, convince a decision maker they really need to contact you to find out more. This is just a screenshot, the pdf can be found at cdyf.me/Neil_Pointer.pdf. There are over 600 CV templates available to choose from at overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv for you to choose from.
Creating a professional looking CV is particularly important, because it determines if you are invited to interview for opportunities you are applying for. The decision to interview is typically based on several factors:
- how your CV looks, the typesetting and style (typography)
- the content of your CV, what you’ve done
- the quality and clarity of your written communication, how you describe yourself and your experience
- the editing, what you’ve decided to leave in (and leave out) of your CV
6.1 Using your CV to get a job interview
By opportunities we mean both immediate ones within the next 12 months as well as those further in the future. To make the most of those opportunities, your CV needs to be persuasive enough to make an employer think they should invite you to interview.
6.1.1 Job opportunities for first year students
During your first year of study, opportunities include insight events and summer internships:
- Spring insights, usually occur during easter vacation, and require you to apply before (or shortly after) Christmas, see
- insight events at bit.ly/gradcracker-spring-insights
- and ratemyplacement.co.uk/insights
- Summer internships suitable for first year, see:
- summer internships (open to first years) at bit.ly/gradcracker-first-years
- the chapter on Finding your Future in Coding your Future (Hull 2024b) for other places you can look
6.1.2 Subsequent opportunities
After your first year opportunities include:
- Year long placements in your penultimate year, if you’re considering doing industrial experience
- Summer internships (aimed at penultimate year students) + there are usually around ten summer internships in the Department of Computer Science for example, these normally don’t get advertised around April/May time
- Graduate jobs or graduate schemes after graduation
- Postgraduate study or research via masters or PhD etc
Any time you invest in creating a convincing CV will pay off in the long run. Yes, you’ve only just started University, so might not have much to talk about just yet, but it’s never too early to make a start.
6.2 Exercise five: your CV
Create a basic CV which tells your story, in particular:
- your education, including high school and University
- your experience, voluntary, paid, casual, technical and non-technical: any experience demonstrates your range of soft and hard skills
- your projects, personal, social, educational and entrepreneurial
You can do this using the ready-made templates at overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv. Have a good look around, there are over 600 templates to choose from.
6.3 Debugging your CV checklist
As you progress through University, continuously update your CV and solicit feedback from as many people as you can. Your fellow students, personal tutors, friends, family and anyone else you trust can all give you valuable feedback. There will be opportunities to debug your CV later, but you’ll need a “beta release” (version 1.0) of your CV to get started. The best time to start debugging is now, so that you can squash any bugs before employers see them. Innocent bugs can be fatal because most employers typically have to deal with lots of applicants. Here’s a check list of some common bugs we have seen in students CVs:
- Is your year of graduation, degree program, University and expected (or achieved) degree classification clear?
- Are there any spelling mistakes, typos and grammatical errors? Don’t just rely on a spellchecker, they can’t detect everything
- Does it look good, decent layout, easy to scan?
- Does it fit comfortably on one page (preferably) or two pages only? Not too cramped or gappy?
- Is it in reverse chronological order? Are the most important (usually recent) things first?
- Have you talked about what you have actually done using prominent verbs, rather than just what you know? See the Verbalising your Future chapter of Coding your Future for more examples
- Have you mentioned disciplines you are studying now and throughout the current academic year, not just courses you have finished?
- Have you quantified and provided evidence for the claims you make?
- Is your CV robot proof? Many large employers use automated applicant tracking systems that use software to screen CVs long before a human ever sees them. You can feed your CV through software like careerset.com/manchester and resume.io, what feedback do the robots give you? How can you make your CV more robot proof?
- Find out more in the debugging your future checklist at cdyf.me/debugging#checklist (Hull 2024a)
- If you’re a University of Manchester student, take a look at the CV pathway from the careers service at bit.ly/uomcvpathway which requires a
careerconnect.manchester.ac.uklogin - unfortunately not the same as your University credentials
6.4 Summary
Your curriculum vitae is a really important document and it will most likely take many iterations to get it right. We recommend you start working on it sooner rather than later and get feedback from as many different people (and bots) as you reasonably can.
In the meantime, enjoy exploring and using LaTeX to create professional documents for:
- your individual COMP101 coursework (see blackboard)
- your CV / resume
- your third year project dissertation. It might seem a long way off now but it comes around very quickly!
…and more.
References
strictly speaking it should be vitæ (not vitae) if you’re being pedantic↩︎