How to Write a Magnificent CV for Your LL.M. Application: My Insights After Evaluating 100+ Applications as a Member of the Admissions Committee

While doing my Ph.D. at the European University Institute, I evaluated hundreds of LL.M. (master of laws) and Ph.D. applications as a member of selection committee. CV is a core component of an LL.M. application, and it's crucial to get it right.

I've written about the CV that got me into Harvard LL.M. before.

In this post, I share my insights, highlight common mistakes, and explain how to make your LL.M. CV as competitive as possible.

LL.M. CV: Key sections to include

The essential sections of your CV should include:

1. Header:

• Include: your name, email, mobile number, and (optionally) address.
• Don't include: your driving license number, WhatsApp, or Telegram details unless explicitly required. It can look unprofessional.

2. Education

3. (Professional) Experience

4. Optional Sections:

• Can include publications, prizes and awards, languages, community service, and extracurriculars. Choose based on what you have in your background.
• Avoid calling any section 'other' or 'additional'. Evaluators won’t interpret it as ‘additional and potentially interesting information.’ Rather, they might dismiss it unimportant and skip it.
• Don’t number sections. Numbers draw the reader's attention away from the content.
• Don’t call your CV a 'biography.' It’s not.
• The first line of your LL.M. or Ph.D. CV should be your first and second name in a slightly larger font than the rest. Do not include the words ‘CV’ or ‘Résumé.’ Just your name.
• Don’t include a summary on top. It’s usually uninformative. The key information about your qualifications should be easily scannable from the CV itself.

LL.M. CV: Education comes before experience

If there’s one mistake I often see, it’s placing professional experience before education. For LL.M. and Ph.D. applications, education should always come first.

Why?

The reasons are as follows:

1. You're applying for academic study, not a job. You'll be evaluated on your academic merit. Unless it's a practice-oriented program, your education therefore matters more to the selection committee.
2. Often, education is the only qualification that can be meaningfully compared across candidates. Work experience, internships, and community service vary too widely to serve as a consistent benchmark. At the same time, education is something every applicant has, at least in the context of LL.M. admissions. Universities have rankings, and they assign grades. It’s a highly imperfect system, and your grades might have little to do with how smart or accomplished you are. Still, they help establish a basic level playing field.
3. This doesn’t mean you’ll be judged solely on your grades, especially if you’re a seasoned practitioner, not at all. Most evaluations are holistic. But grades and university rankings offer a standardized baseline for assessment. That’s why education is usually the first thing evaluators look at.

Make your education easy to find. In an LL.M. application, place education at the very beginning of a CV, before employment, on the first page.

How to present education in your LL.M. CV

A few guidelines for presenting education in your LL.M. CV:

• Don’t just state your university. State the degree you received, the place, and the date.
• Make sure it's clear what are your degrees and what is non-degree education. List non-degree education separately (see example below). You’ll be judged, first and foremost, on education that resulted in a degree.
• Don’t indicate online courses in the education section. It can be misleading. If you indicate ‘University X’ as the one you got your bachelor’s degree from and follow it up by ‘Yale Law School,’ and the latter is where you took an online course from Coursera, the selection committee will not think of you as an amazing applicant who studies online in their free time at a prestigious university. They will think of you as a someone who misrepresents the facts and tries to take credit for something they did not do.

A way to visually separate your degree programs and other education is this:

‘University X, XX city, xxx country

[type of degree, dates]

Exchange: UniversityY, YY city, yyy country’

Alternatively, you can make an entirely different section titled something like ‘additional education’ or ‘supplementary education’ and put your online courses/ summer schools there.

How to Present Professional & Academic Experiences in your LL.M. CV

• For more impact, try to frame your professional experiences in terms of outcomes you helped achieve, eg, following the Stanford guide on writing CVs.
• Don't include career objectives. The only objective you can have when applying for an LL.M. or a scholarship is to get admission to the program or get scholarship. If you include career objectives, the selection committee will think that you submitted a generic CV that you’ve previously used for a corporate job and that you didn’t put any effort in your application – which would mean that probably you don’t want it so much – which increases your chances of being rejected.
• Don’t use abbreviations that are specific to your country – most people abroad won’t understand them. Give full names but simplify. For instance, don’t say ‘MSU’ – say ‘Moscow State University’. Use the same name consistently throughout the entire LL.M. CV and other application documents, don’t switch suddenly to abbreviations after using full name. It confuses the reader.
• Don’t give a form of a legal entity that you worked for, such as ‘JSC’ (joint stock company). It clutters the CV and carries zero useful information. Just give the company’s name.
• Indicate everything in reverse chronological order. Start with your latest degree, then a degree before that (if you have multiple). Same for jobs and internships.
• Don’t indicate secondary or high school education in an LL.M. or Ph.D. CV unless explicitly required otherwise.
• Don’t use tables, especially don’t use a table inside a table. Tables make the text harder to read and draw attention away from the content to the table itself. The only exception is if you are explicitly asked to provide a CV in a tabular form (common for applications in Germany).
• Don’t use corporate templates, especially those that have colored columns on the side. They are hard to read and steal valuable space.
• Don’t use Euraxess template unless explicitly required. Its use of space is inefficient.
• Don’t print and scan your LL.M. CV. Type your CV in Microsoft Word and the convert it to PDF to avoid the distortion of formatting.
• Don’t include general areas of interest like ‘reading and dancing’. They usually don’t help the selection committee to make a decision about you. However, you can include more specific extracurricular achievements, such as ‘7 years of musical school’ or ‘competitive ballroom dancer’ or anything else that applies to you.
• The entire LL.M. CV should be 2 pages maximum.
• If you don’t have enough information for 2 pages, make it 1 page – play with formatting and phrasing. Don’t leave it at 1,5 page; it looks unprofessional.
• Don’t certify or sign your LL.M. CV.
• Don’t give links to the websites of companies you worked for or the universities you studied at. It’s unnecessary and looks unprofessional.
• For publications, use one of the accepted international formatting styles, eg, OSCOLA.
• Don’t include a photo unless explicitly required. It takes up space and can lead to unconscious biases against you.
• Tailor your LL.M. CV to the program’s selection criteria, its purpose, and, if it's a scholarship, the funder’s needs.

Final Thoughts

There are many ways to craft an effective CV for an LL.M. or Ph.D. application. In this post, I’ve shared insights from my experience evaluating LL.M. CVs as a member of the admissions committee. An actionable summary of my insights is also available as a downloadable guide.

If you’re looking for more guidance, I've also created a comprehensive course, Harvard State of Mind on Demand, to guide LL.M. applicants through developing all major components of a successful LL.M. application, including personal statements, CVs, and recommendations. It incorporates the insights I learnt during my time at Harvard from the university's career office.

If you'd like a personalized review of your CV or help getting started, please read about my approach and fill out a short application form.

Hope it helps and good luck! ☺️