 I don't normally do this, I try to be positive, but look, your CVs, they suck. All right, this is what I think of your CVs, right here. This is what I think of them, all right. This is honestly how I feel about the CVs. Most of you guys have no idea what you're doing with a CV, and I get that. Like, I understand that. You probably haven't been taught how to make a good CV before. Hopefully I can fix that today. My name is Mitchell, welcome to the Score Channel, and I need to put this out now before my house burns down. Also known as a resume in the United States, the CV is kind of a confusing document for a lot of people. Odds are, if you're coming out of high school, you've never made one of these before. So today we're gonna show you everything that you need to know to make an awesome CV that will make it really clear to every university abroad who you are. That's exactly what a CV is designed to do. The word CV comes from curriculum vitae. Literally meaning like a record of your whole life. So the idea is to, in just a few pages, encapsulate your entire existence and transmit that in the most direct, succinct way possible. Now, if that sounds like a really hard thing to do, that's cause it kind of is. How in the world do you take every life experience and put it into such a small document? Well, the key is you don't put everything in there. One of the most important things you're gonna have to do with your CV is filter information. Not everything needs to go into your CV. So what should your CV include? One thing I like to encourage people to do at the very beginning of their CV is to put an objective statement which simply says what you're trying to accomplish with this document. That would be the best thing to do, a single sentence to let the reader know that this CV is in the correct location. You're gonna wanna include any educational experiences from the last four years. If you are applying to an undergraduate major, you're gonna wanna have your last four years of high school documented in your CV. If you're applying to a master's or postgraduate program, then you would wanna include your bachelor's studies and also maybe just mention where you got your high school diploma. Education information should include things like your GPA, your position in your graduating class. You might wanna include any extra courses or high level courses that you took. For example, if you did AP courses in an American school or if you took high level courses in the international baccalaureate. After your education information, you're gonna wanna think about different experiences you've had. You could put things related to volunteering, working at a company, being part of a sports club, starting your own business or NGO. Whatever it is, it should be something that you've done significantly for at least a year. If you're applying to a postgraduate course, though, you'll probably have less extracurricular activities and instead focus more on your work experience or your study experiences. What goes on that first page is always going to be more important. And that's another important rule when it comes to CVs. Put things in the order of importance. Even though the custom with CVs and resumes is to put things in reverse chronological order, undergraduate students are free to put things in the order of importance. Your most important activities should go first. Next thing you wanna think about are all of those other extracurricular activities that you do. Keep in mind that these do not need to be formal things that have been done with an organized team or event. If you like to play piano in your home and you've never taken a lesson and you've never played for a band, that's okay. Mention that you play piano. If you've been teaching yourself Japanese in your own free time and you love anime, go ahead and put that. There are really no limits on this section, but do understand that you shouldn't just throw a thousand things in there to impress people. Another thing you should do to save space is try to consolidate similar activities wherever possible. I see a lot of CVs where they list seven different volunteer activities, each one that lasted three or four months. It would really be a lot better to just combine all of these into a single experience. If it's all in one place where you can just talk about all the different volunteering activities that you've done, it's gonna be a lot easier for the person reading it to follow and it will take up a lot less space in your document and that's gonna be important when we get to the end. The next thing to include are any awards or recognitions that you may have received. If you got a prize for, say, winning a literature contest at your school or for having perfect attendance, this would be a good place to put those rewards. You may need to give a brief, but very brief, explanation of your award. For example, here in Peru, we have some called Juegos Flores, which is like spring games, which doesn't always have anything to do with athletics. It's a lot of times academic competitions. If you don't explain what that means, nobody abroad is gonna understand what that award was for, so you should at least just give a quick synopsis or say the event that you won so that people can kind of figure it out. So with your objective, your education, your extracurriculars and your awards, all figured out what's left to do. If you're anything like most of the people I've worked with, you need to go in and reduce your text significantly. The number one mistake I see on CVs is people putting way too much personal information, too much feeling into a CV. This is supposed to be the driest, most simplified document possible. We do not need to know how you feel about anything. If you say you like swimming and you've just put a paragraph about how swimming is important to you, you've made a big mistake. Nobody cares who taught you how to swim or how you feel when you're swimming or the sensation that it leaves you with the rest of the day. All they wanna know is whether you do it, how often you do it, how long you've been doing it, and that's about it. Nobody really cares how you feel about these activities. We can assume that you probably like them because you do them and we can assume they make you feel happy because otherwise why would you do them? Similarly with your education, you don't need to explain a whole bunch of information about your school. Remember that they have the school profile on Common App so they don't need you to write paragraphs about how great your school was. Focus on what you did in school, that's all they care about. The Experiences section is one of the few where I would encourage people to speak a little bit more but again, stay focused on the facts. How did you get into this experience? How did you develop during it and what have you learned from it or what do you intend to do in the future? It's gonna seem a little weird to write things like in simple short sentences but that's what you really need to do here. Ideally, a CV ought to be two pages. It's possible for it to go longer. It's not like a job resume where you definitely need to make it two pages or less no matter what. But with a CV, if you're getting more than three pages, honestly, you're probably going too far. I would say you either need to reduce your text more or combine more items or just delete things that aren't that big of a deal. I mean, if it's an activity that you did for two or three months and never did again, you probably can delete it. And while I know it's important to try to show as many things as you can, if those things are not actually valuable things that have been a major part of your life, then they're just filler. I could talk in my CV about how I've spent more than 2,000 hours on Rocket League, but honestly, I don't think that has any positive impact on my application to university. The final things you're gonna wanna do are just make sure that your personal information is correct. You want your name to be front and center and then it's time for the final pass, your format pass. This is super important. One thing that people do not seem to understand about CVs is that they really should look perfect. I know perfectionism is something we frown upon but in this case, it really says a lot about you. If your fonts are different sizes or they're inconsistent spacing between words and sentences or you've got things indented a little too much here but not enough over here, it all says that you don't know how to do a basic document and that you don't pay attention to detail. That's really the worst things that you can show people. So you wanna make sure that this document is spotless. I mean, perfect grammar, perfect spelling, make sure everything's aligned properly. If you use size 11 font in this paragraph, it should be the same in this other paragraph. If you use a purple bullet point, it should be purple everywhere. If you indent this much when you put a title, it should be here too. Consistency is everything. If you feel that you've gotten your CV all perfectly formatted and it has all the information that you can comfortably fit into your two or three pages and you have good details about the right kind of events, you're probably ready to go. Have somebody look it over, show it to a teacher, show it to a friend, get somebody else's opinion because odds are there's something that you have missed. Even myself, when I have applied for jobs and I put together a new CV, I always show it to somebody else and say, take a look please, let me know if there's something missing because it's really easy to lose track of what you're doing when you're working on a document that's all about you. You know everything about your life. You remember all these details, nobody else does. So you might have an inconsistency that makes sense to you, but to a total stranger, it's extremely confusing. And that my people is basically everything you need to know to make your CV for university. If you've already done it and you wanna share it or get some feedback on it, let us know at prepwithscore.com because I would love to take a look at your work. If you're looking for more support for your CVs, check out the live stream that I did a few weeks ago where I built my own CV for university and I just went through each and every part to kinda show you what it should look like when you're done. So that can help you out a lot and if you need any more assistance, you can always go to prepwithscore.com and hit us up for more details. I'll see you next week.