Reviewers spend under a minute on a first pass. These are the conventions they expect, for graduate applications and for the job market. Follow them and your content does the talking.
Order sections by relevance to research: research interests, education, research experience, publications, teaching, awards and grants, skills, references. Committees read top to bottom and stop when convinced.
Education entries carry your thesis title, supervisor if known in the field, and rank or GPA when strong. Leave GPA out if it does not help you.
Publications follow one citation style throughout, reverse chronological, with the full author list in original order. Never reorder authors. Conference posters and talks go in their own section once you have more than two.
Research experience bullets state what you did and what came of it: an instrument mastered, a dataset built, a result that made it into a paper. One line each.
Referees appear with full name, title, institution and email. Three is standard. Ask them before listing them.
Length is not the constraint it is for industry. Two pages is normal for a master's applicant, longer with publications. Cut padding, not substance.
One page until you pass roughly eight years of experience. Recruiters filter fast; a second page is only read if the first earns it.
Experience leads, most recent first. Each bullet starts with a verb and ends with a number where one exists: revenue, time saved, error rates, users. 'Responsible for reporting' says nothing; 'cut weekly reporting from 6 hours to 40 minutes' does.
Mirror the vocabulary of the job listing in your skills and bullets. Applicant tracking systems match terms literally, and so do tired reviewers.
If you are applying through an online portal, use the ATS Safe template: single column, no tables, standard headings. Save the styled layouts for CVs a human opens directly.
Leave out photos, age, and marital status for US, UK and Canadian applications. Include a photo only where local convention expects one, as in parts of continental Europe.
Proofread aloud once. Most rejected CVs fail on avoidable noise, not weak experience.
Pick a template and put this into practice.
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