A PhD and doctoral candidate CV builder organised around what academic hiring and fellowship committees read first: dissertation and research, teaching assistantships, conference presentations, publications in progress, fellowships and awards, and technical skills. You fill a structured form and a clean CV builds live beside it.
How it works
An academic CV is content-led, not capped at one page, so the builder gives each scholarly signal its own section. Dissertation / research captures your topic, advisor, committee, and methods. Teaching assistantships lists the courses and responsibilities that show instructional experience. Conference presentations separates oral talks from posters with venue, location, and year. Publications (in progress) lets you list items with accurate status — in prep, submitted, under review, in press — and author position, including preprints. Fellowships & awards captures funding and honours, and technical skills rounds out your methods. A repeatable experience section covers research and lab roles, and education lists your degrees.
The right panel re-renders the CV as you type. Your draft auto-saves to local storage, and the Copy text and Download .txt buttons export a clean, parseable file.
Tips
Lead with your research — on an academic CV it defines you. Label every in-progress publication honestly and note first-author work, since committees scrutinise this. Include venue and year for every presentation, and do not omit funding: a competitive fellowship is strong evidence of promise.
Handling publications in progress
This is where many PhD CVs go wrong in one of two ways: either omitting work that is genuinely near submission (underselling), or listing speculative future papers as if they were imminent (overselling). A clear labelling scheme avoids both:
- In preparation — the work exists and is being written; do not list it if it is more than 12 months from submission.
- Submitted — the paper is with a journal or conference; include the journal name.
- Under review — after peer-review invitations have been confirmed.
- Accepted / in press — confirmed for publication; state the journal and expected issue if known.
- Preprint — posted to bioRxiv, arXiv, SSRN, or similar; include the DOI.
Always note whether you are first author, corresponding author, or co-author, and list co-authors in field-standard order. Committees scrutinise author order very carefully.
Teaching assistantships: more than a line
Teaching experience is often undersold. Go beyond the course name — note the type of responsibility (running seminars, marking, demonstrating, holding office hours, writing exam questions) and the approximate student cohort size if it demonstrates scale. A teaching statement or teaching portfolio is separate from the CV, but the CV entries should give enough context that a hiring committee knows what kind of instructor you have been, not just which courses you were assigned to.
Example
A fourth-year PhD candidate might lead with a dissertation on chromatin remodeling, name the advisor and committee, list two years of teaching assistantships for biochemistry seminars (running weekly sessions for 30 students), an oral talk at EMBO and two conference posters, a first-author manuscript in preparation plus a co-authored published paper, and a Wellcome Trust studentship. The result reads as a productive, visible researcher with independent teaching experience — far stronger than a thin one-page resume that lists only degree dates.