Tin (Kevin) Nguyen

• Lead with facts and evidence rather than emotion, enthusiasm, or unsupported claims.
• Edit aggressively: remove lists, repetition, filler, and details that do not serve the specific application.
• Write as a future colleague—not as a supplicant—and get repeated feedback from experienced readers.

• Use professional formatting, normal business-letter conventions, and approximately two pages for an early-career application.
• Show evidence of research, teaching, publications, future plans, and collegial contributions instead of making generic claims.
• Move quickly from the dissertation to its broader contribution, publications, second project, teaching, and specific departmental connections.
• Tailor every letter to the job, department, programs, faculty, and campus; avoid flattery and vague “fit” statements.

Core idea: Treat the CV as an actively built record of the career you want—not a passive list of everything you have done.

• Build deliberately: Review the CV monthly and aim to add meaningful progress, such as a publication, grant, invited talk, course, or professional service contribution.
• Choose quality over quantity: Prioritize peer-reviewed publications, competitive grants, major conferences, and substantive teaching experience over easy, low-status lines.
• Format for scanning: Use consistent type, one-inch margins, clear headings, left-aligned entries, and visible years. Keep the layout simple and easy to update.
• Use a CV, not a résumé: Avoid boxes, columns, decorative graphics, narrative paragraphs, personal stories, and descriptions of routine duties.
• Organize the record: Include education, professional appointments, publications, awards, grants, invited talks, conference activity, teaching, research, service, skills, memberships, and references as appropriate for your field.
• Lead with competitive work: Give the most status and visibility to peer-reviewed publications, significant funding, recognized awards, invited talks, and other externally evaluated accomplishments.
• Show real teaching: Solo-instructor experience is stronger evidence than TA work. If needed, develop realistic syllabi and course proposals for classes you can teach.
• Keep service proportional: Service matters, but it should not crowd out research, grants, teaching, or conference activity.
• Follow local norms: Publication conventions, coauthorship, conference proceedings, section order, and expected length vary by discipline and country; check with trusted experts.

Practical test: For every new line, ask whether it advances your research, teaching, funding, visibility, or target career. If not, spend that time on a stronger accomplishment.

• Keep it concise—typically one page—and replace a life story with a clear teaching principle supported by evidence.
• Use specific courses, assignments, methods, and outcomes; show what students did and what they learned.
• Avoid clichés, excessive emotion, humility, and claims such as “I am passionate about teaching.”
• Adapt the emphasis to the institution, connect teaching to research, and end with a strong statement of broader educational purpose.

• Choose relevant, teachable syllabi with clear descriptions, appropriate workloads, assignments, and policies.
• Make proposed courses appealing to students, innovative, connected to the position, and complementary to existing offerings.
• List courses, levels, and enrollment briefly; summarize evaluations rather than sending an overwhelming archive.
• Prioritize evidence from courses where you were the primary instructor over routine TA materials.

• Usually keep it to about two pages in the humanities and soft social sciences; follow field-specific norms elsewhere.
• Center the research: explain the overarching agenda, dissertation argument, methods, contribution, publications, and future work.
• Include a distinct second project so the record shows continuity, independence, and a sustainable research trajectory.
• Use confident, active language; minimize “interest” talk, grand claims, negativity, unnecessary citations, and references to other application documents.

• Connect awareness of inequity and access to concrete choices in teaching, research, mentoring, and service.
• Use specific experiences, practices, and outcomes rather than identity claims or vague commitments.
• Show how you work with students from different backgrounds and prepare them to participate in a diverse society.

• Frame the big disciplinary problem, briefly position the literature, identify a gap, and present your project as the response.
• Summarize the material, theory, methods, chapter contributions, original argument, and wider significance.
• Keep the research and contribution central; avoid process narratives, jargon, literature-review overload, and empty adjectives.