Preparing Your Academic Vita

Preparing Your Academic Vita.doc is a useful handout.

You should have several versions of your vita on hand:

“Kitchen sink” vita—this is your personal version that lists everything you have ever done that is remotely related to your professional life, including every workshop you attend and every reference letter you write. Update it at least once a year, as you complete your annual report. Some people update it every time they do something. (Put a watermark of “kitchen sink” across it—you will be embarrassed if you send it out by mistake!)

Annual report vita—Take your “kitchen sink” vita and remove anything irrelevant. (Most will stay in)

Professional vita—Take your “kitchen sink” vita and shorten it. Remove much of the university service. In any category, you might have “Recent . . .” and limit to the most recent 5 years. Rearrange topics to suit the occasion. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed gives suggestions of what to omit to get a shorter (even 3 page) vita. How to shorten a CV.

Other tips:

Organization is crucial. Most have:

Identifying information
Education
Academic/Professional positions
Teaching: courses, awards, peer review (given or received), SoTL work (if not under Research), other
Research: publications, presentations, in progress
Service: academic (IU, IUSB, School, Dept.) and professional, community

In most cases, use reverse chronological order.

Many people suggest that you use a serif font, in a readable (but not too large) font size. Headers can be a san serif font in bold.

Bullet points can be helpful. Use headers and white space to make it attractive and easy to read. This is not the time to worry about wasting paper!

Here is a template designed by Sean Hottois in New Media, that makes good use of font, bullets, and white space.

Do not include personal information (hobbies, marital status, etc)

Save in .docx so that you can edit, but make a PDF to share with others so that the formatting stays the way you intended.

Sample vitae

It can be helpful to look at lots of different vitae to get ideas for formatting, what might be included, etc. Several IUSB faculty have agreed to post their vita here for you to see. Some are for promotion (so quite complete) while others may be for other purposes. They are from faculty in different positions and units. The first one, from Susan Cress, is particularly readable, organized, and easy to use.

More:

Cress Education Full.docx

MooreSL_CV_full.pdf

Feighery_Full_Chemistry.docx

Blouin Sociology Asso. Prof.docx

Souther PTR.pdf

Martinez Communication Lecturer.pdf

McInerney Communications Lecturer CV.pdf

Sullivan U100 Lecturer.doc

Hope Davis tenure CV_8_19_14.doc

Savvopoulou_tenure_CV_2015.pdf

Meisami CV tenure.pdf

Mettetal teaching award 2016.docx

Youngs Senior Lecturer.pdf