At 12 pages in length, this CV for an associate professor of nursing details an impressive amount of academic and professional activity. She is interested in pursuing community-based research with children, youth, and families living in urban areas. However, she has buried her research-oriented qualifications on her CV. Its current organization makes it difficult to find the key information that supports her goal. Everything on her vita is treated as equally important, which is rarely the case given a specific job opportunity. The document should be reorganized and condensed to spotlight her main qualifications at a glance and invite further reading for more details. We would suggest she start her CV with a short statement about her current research, and then order her sections in this way: Academic Appointments, Education, Selected Teaching Experience, Publications and Presentations, Grants and Fellowships, Students Advised, Honors and Awards, Other Appointments, Professional Consultantships, Licensure and Certification, Professional Associations, Professional Service, University Service, and Other Professional Service. Usually, publications are listed at the end of a vita, but in this case we want to make sure that readers don't miss them because they've gotten bogged down in the other elements of her substantial experience.

-- Mary Morris Heiberger and Julia Miller Vick

Examples:

• CV for an A.B.D. in the humanities
• CV for an administrator
• CV for an M.F.A.
• CV for a Ph.D. with a prior professional career

1.) Remove the "Curriculum Vitae" heading. It's unnecessary.

2.) The format used in the "Education" section (and in most of the earlier sections) is unattractive. It's unnecessary to use labels such as "undergraduate," "graduate," and "Post Doctoral." More importantly, the candidate has placed all of the key information near the end of the section. All of her entries (in this section and elsewhere) should be in reverse chronological order, with her more recent experiences listed first. In addition, she should provide some brief information about her doctoral degree and postdoctoral work, such as the title of her dissertation. The information about her education should be placed after the section detailing her academic appointments, given that she earned her graduate degree a decade ago.

3.) Throughout the CV, the candidate lists subheadings -- for example, "Institution and Location, Degree, Date." Delete them. They are unnecessary.

4.) Here, too, the list of positions held by the candidate should be in reverse chronological order. The format is unattractive, and very little information is actually conveyed.

5.) Omit course numbers in the "Teaching Assignments" section. Those numbers are only meaningful to readers at the institution where the course is taught. At this point, the format of the CV shifts from columns of information to a grid. The switch makes the vita seem disjointed. A candidate who has taught as many courses as this one could relabel this category "Selected Teaching Experience" and list only the most significant courses, with the name of the institution, the location, and the date. She could add a phrase at the end of this section like, "A complete list of courses taught is available upon request."

6.) The title of this section is vague. It should be renamed "Students Advised" or "Students Mentored." Each of the five students listed here received an award as noted in the "Graduate Student Awards/Honors" section below. Add the awards to the original entries and get rid of thet subsection.

7.) Combine these two subsections.

8.) Once again, the candidate has provided too much information and in the wrong order. Rename this section "Selected Community Service," delete some entries and move the whole section toward the end of the CV Instead of listing each separate experience, the candidate could consolidate the entries into subsections such as "facilitator/moderator," "speaker," or "board member."

9.) The candidate's faculty appointments should not be listed in a "University Service" section. They are already listed on the first page under "Academic Appointments."

10.) Presentations of a candidate's research should not be in the same section as her professional service. We suggest moving the presentations to a "Publications and Presentations" section.

11.) As the entries under "Grants and Fellowships" appear to all be for training and research grants, this section should simply be called "Grants." This is an impressive section and an important one to have for pursuing a research career.