Should You Remove Undergraduate Awards from Your CV? A Comprehensive Guide

Crafting a compelling curriculum vitae (CV) or resume is crucial for showcasing your accomplishments and standing out in a competitive field. A key component of this process is deciding which awards to include and when it might be appropriate to remove older ones, particularly undergraduate awards. This article explores the nuances of listing awards on your CV, providing guidance for students and professionals alike.

Introduction: The Value of Awards

Awards serve as official recognition of your achievements, highlighting your skills and accomplishments to potential employers or academic institutions. They demonstrate excellence, dedication, and the ability to excel in your field. Including relevant awards on your resume solidifies and highlights your results and accomplishments and helps you stand out to future employers. Awards can also help prove that you have some of the key qualifications or traits for a given job opening, such as strong leadership skills or reliability.

Determining Award Relevance

Before adding every award you have ever received, it is essential to evaluate its relevance to your current career goals. Consider the following questions:

Does the award demonstrate a skill or accomplishment relevant to the job or program you are applying for?
Does it showcase expertise in a specific area or industry?
Is the award prestigious or well-known in your field?

If the answer to these questions is yes, the award is likely worth including on your CV.

Types of Awards to Consider

Here are some examples of the types of awards you might include:

Read also: Undergraduate Programs at UNC

Education Awards

These awards showcase your achievements in an academic setting. In addition to showing mastery of the subjects you studied, these awards can also speak to your soft skills. For example, GPA-based awards tell people reading your resume that you’re hardworking, have good time management skills, and are goal oriented. These awards are mostly relevant for early career job seekers unless they’re especially prestigious (such as, for example, a Rhodes Scholarship, which you might keep on your resume further into your career).

Academic programs (such as an honors program at your college)
Dean’s list or honor roll
Departmental awards
Fellowships
Honor societies
Research or project grants
Latin honors
Scholarships (including scholarships awarded by your school, other organizations, or the government)
University awards

Company Awards

Awards given by your current or past employer show that not only do you have the skills you’re touting on your resume, but you also excelled when using them. Every company will have different awards, but here are a few examples:

Employee of the Month
Mentorship or leadership awards
Peer awards (awards your coworkers nominate you for speak to your skills as a team player as well as whatever the award is for)
Top performer awards (for example, Salesperson of the Year)

Industry Awards

These awards show that you’re getting recognition beyond just your company. Sometimes you’ll win these awards as part of a team or company, but they can still go on your resume-just be clear about your specific role was!

Inclusion in a prestigious list or roundup (for example, “Best of…” or “40 under 40” lists by well-known publications in your industry)
Professional association awards (such as CSS Design Awards or Webby Awards)

Other Types of Awards

These awards are especially helpful if you’re an entry-level candidate. But you can add them to your resume later on too when they’re relevant to the job you want or show a key transferable skill. For example, if you’re a graphic designer, you might add that competitive art contest you won. Or if you’re applying for your first management job, that award you got for organizing volunteer events might deserve a spot on your resume.

Arts and cultural awards and contests
Athletic awards (primarily relevant for early-career applicants)
Community, service, or volunteering Awards
Leadership awards (from organizations not directly related to your work)
Military awards or honors (if you’re a veteran)
Other well-known awards (for example, the Gold Award for Girl Scouts or the Eagle Scout for Boy Scouts are great additions to entry-level resumes, Smith says)

The Case for Removing Undergraduate Awards

As you progress in your career, the relevance of undergraduate awards may diminish. Here's when it might be time to remove them:

Increased Experience: As you gain more professional experience, your work achievements become more significant than your undergraduate accolades.
Focus on Specialization: If you are applying for a specialized role, focus on awards that demonstrate your expertise in that specific area.
CV Length: To maintain a concise and focused CV, prioritize the most relevant and recent accomplishments.

Early Career Considerations

If you’re a recent graduate, you can go a little broader, Smith says. For entry-level resumes, you won’t have much or any work experience, so you should include any award that shows you have skills that will transfer to a professional setting, which could include diligence, teamwork, creativity, or perseverance.

Listing Awards on Your CV

Once you have determined which awards to include, consider the best way to present them on your CV.

Placement

You can include your awards in one of two primary places:

In your experience or education sections: You might add awards you won while working at a certain job, volunteering for a certain organization, doing a certain side project, or attending a certain school to the corresponding entry already on your resume. This generally takes the form of a bullet point and can be listed either first or last to draw attention to it.
In a dedicated awards section: Alternatively, you can include awards in their own section if they’re not tied to a specific entry elsewhere on your resume. Smith also recommends an awards section when you have more than one award, to help them stand out. This dedicated section usually goes near the bottom of your resume, Smith says.

If you’ve won a relevant award that’s especially well-known or prestigious, you might also mention it in your resume summary to emphasize it (particularly if the person reading your resume will know what the award is without more details).

Information to Include

When you’re deciding what information to include about your award, “the first thing to consider is the knowledge base of the reader,” Goodfellow says. For example, “[a] recruiter or hiring manager probably won’t know the qualifications of your company’s ‘Rockstar of the Year’ award,” and you’ll have to fill them in about what the award is given for. However, if you’re applying for an internal promotion, she says, you won’t need to include these details.

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You should include the following details about any award you list on your resume, unless it’s well-known enough to the intended reader that it goes without saying:

Name of award
Year awarded: If the award is given out monthly or quarterly, include that as well.
Who gave you the award: Add this information if it’s not obvious from the award’s name. If you were given an award by a particularly polarizing organization, Goodfellow says that you might list something like “local service organization” or “state political party” so the reader doesn’t get caught up in their reputation.
Purpose of the award/why the award is given out: Unless it’s very well-known or self-explanatory from the name, state what the award signifies or recognizes.
The scope of the award: How big is the selection pool for the award? Were you chosen from your team, department, company, university, state, region, or even the entire country?
Why you won it: This is optional if it’s obvious from any of the above, but even in this case you can share some context or color-like what specific customer satisfaction numbers made you the “Customer Service Rep of the Year” or how you contributed to your team winning “Best Digital Marketing Campaign of 2019.”

Formatting Your CV

These expectations will produce a highly-readable, well-organized CV on the American academic model. British and Canadian CV-writers will note that the font is larger, the length is greater, the margins wider, and the white spaces more abundant than you may be used to. These are the typical norms for American CVs (again, admitting of enormous variation among fields and individuals). These norms govern the CVs that are submitted as pdf elements of a job application.

Here are key formatting guidelines:

No bullet points at all, ever, under any circumstances.
No “box” or column formatting of any kind.
No “XXXX, cont’d” headings.
YEAR (but not month or day) OF EVERY ENTRY THROUGHOUT CV LEFT JUSTIFIED, with tabs or indent separating year from substance of entry. Why, you ask? Because candidates are evaluated by their productivity over time. Search and tenure committees wish to easily track yearly output. When you produce is as important as what you produce. Year must be visible, not buried in the entry itself.
NO NARRATIVE VERBIAGE ANYWHERE. No paragraphs describing books or articles. No “My work at the U of XX is difficult to condense…” etc. One possible exception: a separate heading for “Dissertation” with a VERY short paragraph abstract underneath. I disapprove of this. Some advisors insist on it.
The words “Curriculum vitae” immediately underneath or above, centered, in 12 point font. This is a traditional practice in the humanities and social sciences; it might be optional at this point in time, and in various fields. The date, immediately below, centered, is optional.

Standard CV Sections

Education: Always. No exceptions. List by degree, not by institution. Do not spell out Doctor of Philosophy, etc.; it’s pretentious. List Ph.D., M.A., B.A. in descending order. Give department, institution, and year of completion. Do NOT give starting dates. You may include Dissertation/Thesis Title, and perhaps Dissertation/Thesis Advisor if you are ABD or only 1 year or so from Ph.D.. Remove this after that point. Do not include any other verbiage.
Professional Appointments/Employment: This must go immediately under education, assuming that you have/had these. Why? Because the reader must be able to instantly “place” you institutionally. These are contract positions only- tenure track or instructorships. Ad hoc adjunct gigs do not go here; only contracted positions of 1+ years in length. Postdoctoral positions also go here. Give institution, department, title, and dates (year only) of employment. Be sure and reflect joint appointments if you have one. ABD candidates may have no Professional Appointments, and in that case the Heading can be skipped. TA-SHIPS, ETC. ARE NOT LISTED UNDER PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT.
Publications: Subheadings: Books, Edited Volumes, Refereed Journal Articles, Book Chapters, Conference Proceedings, Encyclopedia Entries, Book Reviews, Manuscripts in Submission (give journal title), Manuscripts in Preparation, Web-Based Publications, Other Publications (this section can include non-academic publications, within reason). Please note that forthcoming publications ARE included in this section. If they are already in the printing stage, with the full citation and page numbers available, they may be listed the same as other published publications, at the very top since their dates are furthest in the future.
Awards and Honors: Give name of award and institutional location. Year at left. Always in reverse descending order. Listing $ amount appears to be field-specific.
Grants and Fellowships: (if you are in a field where these differ categorically from Awards and Honors). Give funder, institutional location in which received/utilized, year span. Listing $ amount appears to be field-specific.
Invited Talks: These are talks to which you have been invited at OTHER campuses, not your own. Give title, institutional location, and date. Year only (not month or day) at left.
Conference Activity/Participation: Subheadings: Panels Organized, Papers Presented, Discussant. These entries will include: Name of paper, name of conference, date. Year (Year only) on left as noted above. Month and date-range of conference in the entry itself (ie, March 22-25). No extra words such as: “Paper title:” Future conferences SHOULD be listed here, if you have had a paper or panel officially accepted. The dates will be future dates, and as such they will be the first dates listed. COVID update: If you were accepted to a conference but it was cancelled, you can still list it!
- Campus or Departmental Talks: These are talks that you were asked to give in your own department or on your own campus. These do not rise to the level of an “Invited Talk” but still may be featured under the heading of Campus Talks or Departmental Talks. List as you would Invited Talks. Under no circumstances may guest lectures in courses be listed here or anywhere on the CV.
Teaching Experience: Format in this way: if you’ve taught at more than one institution, make subheadings for each institution. Then list the courses vertically down the left (ie, do NOT use the year-to-left rule that applies everywhere else). To the right of each course, in parentheses, give the terms and years taught. This allows you to show the number of times you’ve taught a course without listing it over and over. Give course titles BUT NEVER GIVE COURSE NUMBERS! COVID update: specify all recent courses as F2F or online or hybrid. This is necessary info now. TA experience goes here. No narrative verbiage under any course title.
Research Experience: RA experience goes here, as well as lab experience. This is one location where slight elaboration is possible, if the research was a team effort on a complex, multi-year theme. One detailed sentence should suffice. COVID update: if research was delayed to do COVID, you might state that, within limits. Unfortunately many campuses are NOT adjusting their norms or expectations to the pandemic, so move here with caution.
Service To Profession: Include journal manuscript review work (with journal titles [mss. review CAN be given its own separate heading if you do a lot of this work]), leadership of professional organizations, etc.
Departmental/University Service: Include search committees and other committee work, appointments to Faculty Senate, etc. Sorry to be a pain, but here the convention is that the Title or Committee is left justified, with the year in the entry.
Extracurricular University Service: [Optional.]
Community Involvement/Outreach.
Media Coverage.
Related Professional Skills: [Optional.] Can include training in GIS and other technical skills relevant to the discipline.
Non-Academic Work: [Optional-VERY optional!] Include only if relevant to your overall academic qualifications. More common in Business, sciences. Editorial and publishing work possibly relevant in English and the Humanities.
Teaching Areas/Courses Prepared To Teach: [Optional]. You can give a brief list of course titles (titles only!) that represent your areas of teaching preparation.
Languages.
Professional Memberships/Affiliations: All professional organizations of which you are a member listed vertically.
References: List references vertically. Give name and full title. Do not refer to references as “Dr. xxx,” or “Professor xxx.” This makes you look like a graduate student. Do not give narrative verbiage or explanation of these references (ie, “Ph.D. Committee member,” etc.).

Peer Review Principle

The organizing principle of the CV is prioritizing peer review and competitiveness. Professional appointments are extremely competitive, and go first. Publications are highly competitive, and go second, with peer reviewed publications taking place of honor. Awards and honors reveal high levels of competition, as do fellowships and grants. Invited talks suggest a higher level of individual recognition and honor than a volunteered paper to a conference-this is reflected in the order. Teaching in this context, ie, as a list of courses taught, is not competitive, and thus is de-prioritized. Extra training you seek yourself, voluntarily, is fundamentally non-competitive.

Ethical Considerations

The practice of strategically removing a student's application from consideration for a second award when they are likely to win a prior one raises ethical questions. While it may benefit other students in the short term, it could be argued that it limits the winning student's opportunities and the potential recognition they deserve.

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