How to Write a Magnificent CV for Your LLM: My Insights After Evaluating 100+ Applications As a Member of the Admissions Committee

Last year, I evaluated hundreds of LLM (master of laws) and PhD applications during the European University Institute selection process. CV is a core component of an LLM application, and it's crucial to get it right. In this post, I share my insights, highlight the most common mistakes, and explain how to make your CV as competitive as possible.

Key sections to include in a CV

The essential sections of your CV should include:

1. Header - your name, email, mobile number, and (optionally) address.

• Do not include your driving license number, WhatsApp, or Telegram details unless explicitly required. It can look unprofessional.

2. Education

3. Experience

4. Optional Sections - publications, languages, community service, and extracurriculars, depending on what you have in your background.

• Avoid calling any section ‘other’ – evaluators won’t think of it as ‘additional and potentially interesting information.’ They might dismiss it unimportant and skip it.
• Don’t number sections - numbers draw the reader's attention away from the content.
• Don’t call your CV a 'biography.' It’s not.
• The first line of your CV should be your first and second name in a slightly larger font than the rest. Do not include the words ‘CV’ or ‘Résumé.’ Just your name.
• Don’t include a summary on top. It’s usually uninformative. The key information about your qualifications should be easily scannable from the CV itself.

Education comes before experience

If there’s one mistake I often see, it’s placing professional experience before education. For graduate applications, education should always come first.

Why?

The reasons are two-fold:

1. You're applying for academic study, not a job. You'll be evaluated on your academic merit. Your education therefore matters more to the selection committee (unless it's a practice-oriented program).
2. Education is the only comparable qualification across candidates. Work experiences, internships, and community service vary too widely to compare meaningfully. simultaneously, education is what everyone has, at least in the context of applications. Universities have rankings, and they award grades. I know, it's a highly imperfect system, and your grades may have very little to do with how smart and accomplished you are. However, they allow to ensure the basic level playing field for everyone. Grades and university rankings provide a standardized baseline for assessment. Education therefore is the first thing the evaluators will look for.  

Make your education easy to find. In an LLM application, place education at the very beginning of a CV, before employment, on the first page.

Guidelines for presenting education

A few guidelines for presenting your education:

• Don’t just state your university. State the degree you received, the place, and the date.
• Make sure it's clear what are your degrees and what is non-degree education. List non-degree education separately (see example below). You’ll be judged, first and foremost, on education that resulted in a degree.
• Don’t indicate online courses in the education section. It can be misleading. If you indicate ‘University X’ as the one you got your bachelor’s degree from and follow it up by ‘Yale Law School,’ and the latter is where you took an online course from Coursera, the selection committee will not think of you as an amazing applicant who studies online in their free time at a prestigious university. They will think of you as a someone who misrepresents the facts and tries to take credit for something they did not do.

A way to visually separate your degree programs and other education is this:

‘University X, XX city, xxx country

[type of degree, dates]

Exchange: UniversityY, YY city, yyy country’

Alternatively, you can make an entirely different section titled something like ‘additional education’ or ‘supplementary education’ and put your online courses/ summer schools there.

Guidelines for other sections of your cV

• Don't include career objectives. The only objective you can have when applying for an academic program or a scholarship is to get admission to the program or get scholarship. If you include career objectives, the selection committee will think that you submitted a generic CV that you’ve previously used for a corporate job and that you didn’t put any effort in your application – which would mean that probably you don’t want it so much – which increases your chances of being rejected.
• Don’t use abbreviations that are specific to your country – most people abroad won’t understand them. Give full names but simplify. For instance, don’t say ‘MSU’ – say ‘Moscow State University’. Use the same name consistently throughout the entire CV, don’t switch suddenly to abbreviations after using full name. It confuses the reader.
• Don’t give a form of a legal entity that you worked for, such as ‘JSC’ (joint stock company). It clutters the CV and carries zero useful information. Just give the company’s name.
• Indicate everything in reverse chronological order. Start with your latest degree, then a degree before that (if you have multiple). Same for jobs and internships.
• Don’t indicate secondary or high school education in a graduate application unless explicitly required otherwise.
• Don’t use tables. Especially don’t use a table inside a table. Tables make the text harder to read and draw attention away from the content to the table itself. The only exception is if you are explicitly asked to provide a CV in a tabular form (common for applications in Germany).
• Don’t use corporate templates, especially those that have colored columns on the side. They are hard to read and steal valuable space.
• Don’t use Euraxess template unless explicitly required. Its use of space is extremely inefficient.
• Don’t print and scan your CV. Type your CV in Microsoft Word and the convert it to PDF to avoid distorted formatting.
• Don’t include your general areas of interest like ‘reading and dancing’. They are usually useless and don’t help the selection committee to make a decision about you. You can, however, include more specific extracurricular achievements, such as ‘7 years of musical school’ or ‘competitive ballroom dancer’ or anything else that applies to you.
• The entire CV should be 2 pages maximum. Under no circumstances should your CV be more than 2 pages. If it’s longer, the selection committee will NOT think you are a super-talented individual whose life doesn’t fit into 2 pages. They will think you are incapable of making strategic choices about the relevance of information you are presenting.
• If you don’t have enough information for 2 pages, make it 1 page – play with formatting and phrasing. Don’t leave it at 1,5 page – it looks unprofessional.
• Don’t certify or sign your CV.
• Don’t give links to websites on your CV, especially the websites of companies you worked for or the universities you studied at. It’s unnecessary and looks unprofessional.
• For publications, use one of the accepted international formatting styles, eg, OSCOLA.
• Don’t include a photo unless explicitly required. It takes up space and can lead to unconscious biases against you.
• Tailor your CV to the program’s selection criteria, its purpose, and the funder’s needs (if it’s a scholarship).

Final Thoughts

There are many ways to craft an effective CV for an LLM application. In this post, I’ve shared insights from my experience evaluating LLM CVs as a member of the admissions committee. If you’re looking for more guidance, I’ve written about Stanford's framework for CVs. An actionable summary of my insights is also available as a downloadable guide.

If you'd like a personalized review of your CV, please reach out for a quote.

Hope it helps and good luck! ☺️