Posted on

How to create your first CV

Creating a curriculum vitae or CV is something every academic has to do sooner or later. In Latin, CV means “course of one’s life.” While there are no major right or wrong ways to construct a CV (disciplinary norms are most influential here), I want to provide some suggestions that may be helpful for knowing how to create your first CV.

How to create your first CV

Photo credit: David Clow

Before discussing the specifics of how to create your first CV, it can be helpful to consider the differences between a CV and a resume. A resume is a short summary of your experiences with the primary purpose of getting a job.

In contrast, a CV is much more detailed catalog of your academic work and experiences where length is not a concern. Some CV’s may stretch 20 or 30 or even more pages long.

A CV captures the full range of work and activities that you engage in as an academic rather than boiling down your experience to a page or two as you would with a resume.

Posted on

Academic writing tips from Stephen King

One of my favorite things to do to improve my writing is to read books on writing. I particularly try to read about writing when I’m struggling with it. Lately, I’ve been transitioning between two large writing projects and my writing has suffered as a result. To help get my writing chops back, I re-read Stephen King’s wonderful book “On Writing:  A Memoir of the Craft.” In his unique style, King packs a tremendous amount of writing advice in a couple of hundred pages. For today’s post, I want to share academic writing tips from Stephen King that will help you get your writing going again too.

Photo credit: Stephanie Lawton
Posted on

Tips for novice qualitative researchers when using quotes

One of the biggest struggles that new qualitative researchers experience is how to make use of their data, specifically the use of quotes. The balance is a delicate one where you want to maintain fidelity to the voices of your participants and other data sources, yet you cannot simply dump pages and pages of transcriptions into the findings section. You have to identify the most central elements, pick out representative quotes, and at the most basic level tell a story about what you found. In this post, I want to provide tips for novice qualitative researchers when using quotes to help navigate this difficult balancing act.

Photo credit: ThoroughlyReviewed
Posted on

How to know you are finished with qualitative data collection

In qualitative research, there is no clear beginning, middle, and end to the research process. Data collection, analysis, and writing phases of research projects are often blurred and inherently iterative. This presents big challenges for doctoral students trying to complete qualitative dissertations. Each of the phases of research informs one another and introduces a messiness into the process that doctoral students undergoing their first major research project can find disorienting and confusing. While you will not necessarily “finish” data collection and analysis before moving forward with writing up the findings and results of your dissertation, the reality is that many students tend to move toward the significant writing of their findings following the competition of data collection and analysis. In today’s post, I want to provide some suggestions for how to know you are finished with qualitative data collection.

Photo credit: seier+seier
Posted on

Interdisciplinarity in Higher Education

As campus leaders across higher education look to advance their institutions, interdisciplinarity research is a commonly pursued strategy. Federal agencies have encouraged this approach by prioritizing interdisciplinary projects. Where do things stand with interdisciplinarity in higher education? In today’s post, I share a discussion of interdisciplinary research including the development, support, and culture of interdisciplinarity in higher education.

Photo credit: Bio Lab