PhD candidate CV, mid-programme.

Writing about unfinished work

A doctoral CV is mostly a description of things not yet complete, and there are only two ways to get it wrong: overstate and be caught, or understate and be passed over. The route between them is precision.

• Published means it has appeared or is in press with a DOI. Nothing else.
• Accepted means the journal has formally accepted it. Say which journal.
• Under review means submitted and acknowledged. Name the journal and the submission month.
• In preparation is worth listing only for one or two manuscripts genuinely close to submission, and label it plainly.

Never let an under-review paper sit unmarked in a published list. Reviewers check, checking is trivial, and being caught converts a strong application into a dishonest one in one line.

Show momentum, not volume

A third-year candidate cannot compete on publication count with a postdoc, and should not try. What a fellowship panel or hiring supervisor is judging is rate — whether output is arriving steadily and will continue after they fund you.

So show the trajectory. Papers with years attached, so the pattern is visible. Conference presentations across successive years. A submission pipeline. Software with growing usage. A thesis with a stated expected date.

Two papers in your second and third years reads better than two papers with no dates, because the first tells a panel what next year will probably look like.

What else counts

Doctoral candidates routinely omit half of what they have done, because it did not feel like part of the thesis.

• Teaching and demarcation work. Labs run, students taught, materials rewritten.
• Supervision. MS students you trained. It is real supervision and it counts.
• Software, datasets and protocols you published, with usage figures.
• Co-reviewing manuscripts with your supervisor — label the caveat honestly.
• Organising reading groups, seminar series, conference sessions.
• Industrial or clinical collaboration, and whether anything you produced was adopted.
• Visiting research periods, with the funder and what came out of them.

For applications outside academia these matter more than the thesis itself, because they are the evidence that you can work with people, ship something usable and finish what you start.