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Curriculum Vitae Overview:
What is a Curriculum Vitae (CV)?
A Curriculum Vitae (CV) is a formal document detailing your professional and academic history. It's often requested by employers, graduate level admissions, scholarship applications, and more! As a pharmacy professional, you will be expected to have a comprehensive CV upon your graduation! The phrase "curriculum vitae" is a Latin phrase that translates to "course of life." Learn how to create, improve, and edit your CV with The Physician Pharmacist.
CV Expectations:
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Your document is visually appealing and organized
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You have proof-read your document. No formatting errors or typos are present.
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Your document contains subsections on education, professional experience, research experience or publications, licenses held, clinical clerkships/rotations, volunteer roles, leadership roles
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General information is provided including name, address, telephone, and email.
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If formally attending an interview, use weighted paper (as opposed to printer paper).
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Always be professional in your prose, content descriptions, and inputs.
CV Mistakes:
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​Writing everything all at once. This document takes time and shouldn't be made from scratch. This increases the likelihood of grammatical errors. A CV should be build over a few day period with constant rewriting and editing.
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Length of a CV is typically irrelevant. While a short 1-2 page CV may look rather lackluster depending on the position level you are applying for, it's probably better than a 6 page document with meaningless/stretched experiences.
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Don't provide age, ethnicity, political affiliation, religious preference, hobbies, marital status, photographs, or other personal identifiers. If you believe any of the following are necessary to discuss, reserve such for the interview.
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Don't overwhelm your future CV reviewer with excessive detail for your experiences. Keep descriptions short and limited to 2-3 bullet points. Don't worry, if they are interested in hearing more they will ask.
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Not being honest. Don't fabricate or stretch your experiences to bolster your application. Reviewers may ask for references for your experiences or request further details on topics listed.
CV vs. Resume:
While both documents summarize your professional history, education, and achievements, but they are not interchangeable. A Resume is typically a One-Page document that provides a concise outline of your merits and experiences. It's essentially a "mini-CV" that highlights one or two major accomplishments, often customized to match the requests of the evaluator. It's use is reserved for less formal applications or as a screening tool for interviewers.
As a pharmacy professional, it is likely that your Resume days are over! As a doctorate candidate, the standard for applications has risen. Whether you are applying to your community pharmacist position or a laundry list of pharmacy residency slots, you will be asked for a CV over a Resume. Resumes offer too little in our particular field and don't share enough to adequately examine an individual. While I still recommend you have a resume document on standby, you probably won't need to update it for several years at a time.
Curriculum Vitae Template:
Now that you understand the basics, you can view the images of my practice CV that I have used for Pharmacy School APPE Rotation Applications and Professional Pharmacist Positions! You can download the Microsoft Word File to Customize your Own Material.
If you used the template, I implore you to take a quick minute of your time and leave a 5-Star Review on my Amazon Book "PharmD to MD."
The Customer Review Section can be viewed after scrolling towards the bottom on the right-hand side of the page.
You have no idea how much this helps!
Thanks for your time!
