From Academia to Industry: Update Your CV for Your Internship/Job Search

Ashley Cross
Aug 12, 2025
4 min read

I sat on an Admissions Committee at Carnegie Mellon and have spent 12yrs working in Career Services, reviewing over 4,000 resumes.

So believe me when I say there are differences between an academic CV used for graduate school applications and an industry-ready resume for the internship/job search.

Think of these as guidelines rather than formally established rules.

Let’s Start with Some Definitions

A CV (in the US) chronicles your academic and educational achievements. It is used for graduate school admissions, official research, full-time positions in higher ed, and professional speaking engagements. It can be more than one page and emphasizes research, publications, patents, academic presentations or conferences, teaching assistantships, fellowships, and honors.

Sometimes US employers will ask you to upload your CV - but what they really want is a resume. Think of the resume as something you use when going into the industry.

A Resume is your highlight reel for the role you are targeting. It should feature your most relevant skills, knowledge, and experiences. It should NOT chronicle everything you've ever done. I would advise limiting it to one page for internships and entry-level roles requiring less than 5 years of experience.

Key Differences

The examples below apply across programs, but were written from the perspective of a Master's in Financial Engineering (MFE) applicant now targeting a quant finance internship.

Writing a CV for Graduate School	Writing a Resume for Internship/Job Search
Okay if it's text-heavy	Should be easy to scan within 6 seconds (e.g., include more white space, margins > 0.5 inches, no less than size 10 font).
Wider scope, you have room to expand on your research, publications, academic achievements, and career-related experience	Narrow focus, emphasize fewer RELEVANT career-related experiences and accomplishments over research/academics
Education will likely take up the majority of your CV and can be split into multiple sections. You may consider adding these to Education: test scores, GPA, academic honors/awards, study abroad, certificates, minor(s), and selected coursework.	Education should be streamlined and smaller than your project and/or work experience sections. You may consider adding these to Education: completed (or current) related coursework, minor(s), GPA*, test scores, certificates (like Baruch C++), and competitions.
Your CV can cover topics like: academic awards/honors, test scores, coursework, projects, patents, publications, conference presentations, leadership, community service, skills, languages, and work/internship experience.	Your Resume should focus on: internships and/or work experience, projects, research, languages, technical and programming skills, additional information (covering anything else unique or relevant about your background).
Graduate schools care about: theoretical knowledge, academic research, educational achievements, and advanced coursework on your CV. Examples for your CV can include: Research or coursework that aligns with the program’s needs; courseworks in physics, calculus, advanced algebra, coding, foundational finance.	Employers care about: demonstration of technical skills through relevant experience/projects. They also want to see how you’ve demonstrated initiative or critical thinking. Examples for your resume can include: Projects that required you to code or use ML and what techniques you’ve used. A club you started in college, where you led a team to raise $500K for a cause.
A variety of extracurriculars, research, and even fundamental finance internships can demonstrate your versatility for a program.	Technical internships are more heavily weighed than research or fundamental finance internships. Extracurriculars and coursera courses can be mentioned, but kept brief (only a few lines).
Don’t worry about interests or hobbies unless these are leadership oriented or related.	You can include interests if you have room. (Alumni love to see them, but some Hiring Managers don’t care.) If you choose to include interests, make them relevant and/or memorable. Examples for your resume can include: Won 1st place / 300 candidates two Goldman Sachs quant-a-thons, played in international piano competitions since age 5, Steelers football fan
Aside from the CV, Admissions Committees look at: transcripts (including coursework and GPA), test scores, strong recommendation letters, school reputation, essay(s), and interviews matter.	Aside from the resume, employers look at: technical proficiency, school reputation, performance on assessments/interviews, references, and verifiable work experience (the background check) matter.

*While GPA and GRE Quant Scores are crucial for entrance into MFE and STEM programs, most US employers care less about these factors and more about your internship and past work experience. After your first job post-graduation, employers will not care about the GPA or GRE, even if they ask about them on job applications.

Bottom line:

If you're applying for grad school or roles in academia, keep your CV is academic and research-focused.

If you're applying to industry, streamline your resume and keep content relevant to the role. Most resumes fail not because the candidate isn’t qualified—but because the resume doesn’t communicate value quickly enough.

In Career+, you’ll get: