I recently read Karen Kelsky’s (“Dr. Karen’s”) excellent academic CV
rules and tried to follow her advice and revise my CV. It
seems like other people could find it useful too, so I wrote up
most of the changes as a LaTeX document class (the safecv document
class) and put it on GitHub.
The repository gives you a document class that sets up formatting for section headers, etc. and also gives you two empty-ish templates to use for your own CV. One is tailored a bit towards grad students entering the academic job market for the first time, and one is more generic. I’m not a graphic designer, and you’re probably not either, so the CV uses Times New Roman. It is the default, conservative, “professional” font for those of us who predate Office 2007, which is essentially everyone who will be in a position to hire you. (Since I have no impulse control, I took this opportunity to buy the Lucida TeX fonts and could not be happier with how they look. But my wife still insists that my CV looks better in Times.)
Is it a great CV template? Nope. Is it better than most of the other CV templates I’ve seen? Yep. Almost entirely because, as Dr. Karen suggests, all of the important dates are flush left and the text is relentlessly left-aligned. Most of the other CV templates I’ve seen are much slicker looking, but they put key information in different random spots in different sections of the document. Don’t do that.
Please open an issue on GitHub if you find errors. Pull requests are welcome too. And read Dr. Karen’s advice most of all.
— Gray Calhoun, 09 Jul 2015
Copyright (c) 2014–2015 Gray Calhoun. This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and any source code listed in this document is also licensed under the MIT License.