Lewis Powell's (Buffalo) tips on CVs

Lewis Powell (University at Buffalo) posted this really helpful guide about how to put together a good CV over at his blog, The Horseless Telegraph. I think it's an invaluable service to early-career philosophers, so do check it out! Here's the introduction to the post:

Very often, I see people asking questions about their CVs—is it okay to list this thing I did on my CV? Does this important thing I did go under research or service, or somewhere else? Etc.—and one interesting feature of this is that the people I see asking are at all stages of their careers. I think this happens because one of the many things we don’t usually teach people how to do in our profession is construct a CV. That’s because constructing a CV isn’t doing philosophy, and we mostly like to focus on teaching people how to do philosophy (or sometimes the teaching part even drops out, and we just like to do philosophy). Also, for obvious reasons of recursion, the people doing the training often don’t really know how to teach people things like “how to make a CV” since they were only ever trained in how to do philosophy and, well, you see where this is going (I imagine that I am overgeneralizing a bit about the sociology of the discipline based on the parts I have been exposed to, and I am fortunate that we had some (extracurricular) training in my grad program from our diligent director of graduate studies about these thing).

Sometimes we tell people to go look at a handful of examples and then make a CV that looks sort of like that. This isn’t an entirely horrible way for people to start working out some of what works and doesn’t for themselves (it’s a slight improvement on everyone deducing CV-ology from first principles). Basically it is a haphazard way for people to observe and internalize some existing CV norms (presuming they looked at a fortunate sample of CVs), but it’s not a great process for understanding what we are doing or why, or helping us answer questions like “what do I do if I have an unusual item to include”?

So I am going to offer a more general account of CVs, which can help answer the specific questions from above. People in the comments and on twitter will, hopefully, let us all know if my perspective is wildly off base, but you should take it with a healthy quantity of salt regardless. I am, after all, just one person. This account will, ultimately make answering the questions above both easier and harder: Often you can make a lot of different choices, depending on what impression you want people to take away from reading your CV. This is because beyond a handful of specific genre conventions, the primary constraints are: clarity, accuracy, relevant completeness.

Comments

[Evan]

One other advice would be to look at the CV of (tenured) professors at said university and look at what they include in it. If the (tenured) professors at said university doesn’t include “public philosophy,” “forthcoming publications,” or other miscellaneous things, then it is perhaps better to not include them if you wish to apply to said university. You may find a pattern of many or most professors who work at said university may or may not include their personal website on their CV. That could be an indicator that they probably view it as either relevant or irrelevant.

Maximizing your chances of impressing the committees is giving them what they like to see as Powell has mentioned. However, although he did mention that giving grad students or post Ph.D people different examples of CVs to look at, he didn’t go far enough, which is looking at the CVs of professors who are currently hired at the university of which one wishes to be hired at.

This targeted approach is both prudentially and epistemically beneficial than looking at random CVs of people from random universities (that you may not have interest in applying at) for the simple reason that said professors (at universities you wish to apply to) may be the ones on the hiring committees who may be looking at your CV. In other words, this targeted approach is more direct, specific, and less superficial. Last, it also answers a lot of the questions posed by Powell in the guide.