ASTR 8500 (O'Connell)
ADVICE ON WRITING CURRICULUM VITAE
IN ASTRONOMY
General
- Your CV is often your first introduction to others, especially prospective
employers. It describes your training, experience, productivity and
(implicitly) your abilities and potential. It is a summary, not a
narrative. Keep it well organized, clear, clean, uncrowded,
succinct.
- An exercise in tempered self-promotion. You should be thorough, but
don't inflate, exaggerate, or overhype. Social media profiles are a bad
influence here.
- Remember that your CV will be seen not just by your prospective
employer but also by people being asked for letters of
recommendation.
- Arrange format so it is easy to update regularly
- For a hardcopy version of your CV:
- Black text only
- Header line on each page except first with your name and the date
- Single 12 point font is best. Use bold face for section headings
and occasionally elsewhere (e.g. highlighting your name in author
lists). Optionally, use italic for journal names, titles of books or
projects, telescopes, etc.
- 3/4"-1" margins
- Most listings are now preferred to be in reverse chronological
order. (Personally, I find this annoying, but it seems to be the
current default. Unfortunately, it implies use of special typesetting
macros if you intend to number publications, for instance).
- For most job opportunities, the most important items in the
list below are publications (refereed), teaching experience (for
faculty positions), research grants, professional recognition,
and leadership positions..
- Be sure to check solicitations/advertisements for any special
items you are expected to supply; some might best be included in
the CV. Usually, there is no need to customize the CV for individual
job opportunities, but you should always assess the main interests of
each institution to see if there are areas that you might want to
emphasize.
- Thanks to the Web, you can now see the CV's of hundreds of
active astronomers. Sample those of people you admire and model yours
accordingly. It would be a good idea to survey the CV's of scientists
at institutions where you are applying.
Typical content and order
- Full name
- Current address and contact information; email address
- Education (college and subsequent): institutions, degrees, major
subjects, dates. Do not list high school. Do not give GPA's. List
any honors (except in degree titles) under "Recognition."
- Research interests (brief list, not description)
- Employment/positions held: dates, title, institution. Additional
entries for each subtitle (e.g. Assistant, Associate Professor).
- Professional affiliations (e.g. AAS, IAU)
- Recognition, prizes, awards, fellowships (academic; college and
subsequent)
- Computer experience: list languages you can program in;
include other significant computing experience (e.g. facility with
sophisticated simulations), pubic software packages or databases you
have developed, etc. Important for young people, not for seniors.
- Observing experience: especially if competitively awarded;
telescopes and instrumentation.
- Instrumentation experience: essential if applying for a job with
possible instrumental components
- Teaching experience: most important are courses for which
you have had complete responsibility; list institutions, years,
titles. TA experience: course name, years; indicate lab or lecture.
Include online teaching. Include research students and postdocs
supervised (could be a separate section).
- Online engagement: Online teaching experience, if any.
List Web postings you have produced that are educational or
professional in nature (e.g. teaching webpages, manuals, project
informational pages, software, databases, etc.). Best not to mention
exposure on social media (X, TicToc, Facebook, blogs, etc) unless you
have become a widely recognized spokesperson/authority in some area.
In fact, given the many horror stories about the immortality of stupid
ideas expressed on social media, I'd recommend maintaining
an extremely low profile there --- at least until tenure and
even beyond. And, yes, it's guaranteed that you will not recognize
the ideas as stupid until after you publish them.
- Outreach experience: local, regional, or national public
outreach; mentoring activities; press/media interactions; online
exposure, etc. Outreach publications (indicate whether these exist,
but it is probably best to list under "Publications" below).
- Other professional activities: often broken into categories.
Institutional, national, international. Journal refereeing, committee
work, proposal reviews, telescope allocation committees, conference
organizing, professional societies, large project participation, etc.
Highlight any elected and/or leadership positions.
- Research grants: sponsor, title, years, amount. Indicate
whether PI or Co-I. "Amount" should be those funds over which you
have personal control. Listing total grant amount (i.e. funds
controlled by other co-investigators) is optional. You can include
pending proposals, but don't list proposals that were not approved
(though you would include those on annual reports for your
institution). Include grants that accompany awards of observing time
(e.g. HST, Chandra) here, rather than under "Observing experience,"
though you can list the time under "Observing."
- Presentations: a list of colloquia, conference talks, etc.
For young people, it's important to include this section; but for
seniors, it's overkill. Give year, title, venue or conference name.
Indicate if a conference talk is "Invited" or "Plenary." Normally you
would not list poster presentations here, but you can include them
under "Non-Refereed Publications" (see below). Can include public
outreach events (e.g. press conferences) here.
- Publications (see below)
Optional content
- Biography: date and place of birth, marital status, children,
etc. Potential issues: age, other discrimination.
- Other interests: unusual activities, hobbies, sports, etc.
Potential issue: academic institutions are usually not interested in
these and are wary of non-academic preoccupations. Use your
judgement.
- Languages: only if you're at least semi-fluent. It's
important to be clear about facility if you're applying to an
institution where you will not be a native speaker.
Publications
- Usually the single most important category
- Publication lists are normally embedded in the CV but could
instead be given separately as a "Bibliography."
- List in reverse chronological order.
- Include your PhD thesis and advisor(s).
- Preferred order is to list refereed journal publications first,
then non-refereed publications. Books and book chapters are usually
listed separately.
- Refereed publications: Include complete citations for all.
Author list (exactly as it appears in press), title, journal & volume,
pages or index number, year.
Put your name in the author list in bold font. If there are more than
about 12 authors, list only the lead author and then the number of
co-authors. (Note that this style differs from the regular format
used in most astronomy journals.)
- Include papers that have been accepted or are "in press"
(i.e. between acceptance and appearance in the journal). Put
papers that have been "submitted" but not accepted under a separate
heading. It's best not to include work "in preparation" unless it is
something major (a monograph, for example) because readers have
no guarantee that it will be completed.
- Numbering publications is important if you are being evaluated
for a job or promotion, so that referees can easily refer to
individual pieces of work. But this is overkill if you have only a
handful of papers.
- You could give a URL for the paper, but this will clutter up the
appearance and isn't very useful in hardcopy; if you do include a URL,
make it to the ADS abstract service.
- Non-refereed publications: List information as for refereed.
Non-refereed items would include papers in conference proceedings,
technical papers or reports, ArXiv postings that aren't submitted to
journals, etc. Can include popular/outreach writing, but is probably
best to make that a separate section. Can include online work.
- For senior people, work presented only in the form of
a poster would not be included. But this disadvantages young
people, whose early contributions will likely be in this form. You
can create a separate section labeled "Meeting Poster Abstracts" and
place entries there. Note that in some cases (e.g. AAS meetings)
poster abstracts are listed on the ADS abstract server. At some
meetings, poster presenters are allowed to put abstracts or one-page
writeups in the published proceedings. In that case, list them under
"Non-Refereed Publications."
- If an author is your student or postdoc, it is good to highlight
this with an asterisk or dagger. Particularly important in the case
of lead authors because this usually represents a
"shared-first-author" credit (the first-author count is a metric
commonly used by hiring committees). Some CV's list first-author
papers separately, but this isn't recommended.
- Highlight any paper that is an "Invited Review" or the
published version of an "Invited" presentation.
- Remember that in some circumstances (e.g. university promotion),
you will be expected to submit hardcopies of publications, so it is
a good idea to update a file of these every time you update the CV.
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Last modified
February 2026 by rwo
Text copyright © 2026 Robert W. O'Connell. All
rights reserved.