I saw this viral tweet about how this guy who was applying as chancellor for the top local university (Ph) and apparently he put in his CV his achievements from all the way back in grade school (including "Most Neat") and that it reached all the way to 57 pages. Not a typo: FIFTY-SEVEN. Just thought you'd enjoy knowing about this cuz of your experience in looking at CVs and resumes, lol
Thank you for sharing this. This is actually very interesting because usually CVs are about 2 to 5 pages, 10 generally being the max, but that’s very dependent on industry. And academia is a weird place. 50+ page CVs are somewhat uncommon but not surprising. I looked up the CV of the chancellor applicant in question and everything seems pretty par for the course. (“Most Neat” is a really cute award. I like it.) The other candidate has 3 pages, so I’m interested to see what the results would be.
There’s a professor at University of Wisconsin - Madison whose CV is 80+ pages, a professor at Columbia University whose CV is 50+ pages, hell, the Cabinet Secretary of Education of Kenya’s CV is 90 pages. When you get up to those positions, this isn’t as surprising anymore. Usually they just write so many papers and articles that their CVs basically become a book report/list of citations. It’s amazing.
Though I think the mentality might be shifting away from these really long CVs, but since I’m not in academia, it’s hard to say.
I just know that in my industry, if that came across my desk, I’m going to have a field day and if came across my boss’s desk, it’s getting tossed.
