Harvard Resume Format: Sections, Layout and a Sample to Copy

The Harvard resume format is the layout that the career office of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Mignone Center for Career Success (formerly called the Office of Career Services), publishes for its students. It is a one-column, text-only resume: your name at the top, a single contact line, bold section headings, and entries listed in reverse chronological order.

Harvard posts the format in three forms: a written guide titled "Harvard College Guide to Creating a Strong Resume", fill-in templates in a bullet-point and a paragraph style, and sample resumes for fields such as tech and engineering. The Extension School, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School publish their own guidance, so "Harvard format" usually means the College template described here.

Anyone can use the style. It is a convention, not a credential, and using it does not mean Harvard has reviewed or approved your resume. Resumity is not affiliated with Harvard; this page describes the format Harvard posts publicly and links to Harvard's own pages in the sources.

The Harvard College template uses four sections below the header, in the order shown here. The guide also tells you to list headings in order of importance for the job, so a strong project or leadership section can move up.

Harvard's own samples rename headings when that helps the reader. Its senior tech example uses "Technical Skills & Projects" and "Relevant Experience" and puts projects above work history, because that is what a software recruiter checks first.

• Header: your name, then one line with street address, city, state and ZIP, email and phone, separated by bullet characters.
• Education: school, city and state, degree and concentration, graduation date. The template marks GPA, thesis and relevant coursework as optional, and says awards and honors can share the coursework line. Study abroad gets its own entry, and undergraduates can add high school with GPA, SAT or ACT scores or honors.
• Experience: organization, city and state (or remote), position title and dates, then bullets, most recent position first.
• Leadership & Activities: clubs, teams, student government and volunteer roles, formatted like Experience or listed without descriptions.
• Skills & Interests (optional): labeled lines for Technical, Language, Laboratory and Interests. The template suggests interests "that may spark interview conversation".

Every entry starts with two lines. Line one has the organization on the left (Harvard's samples set it in bold capitals) and the city and state flush right. Line two has your title on the left, often in italics, and the dates flush right as month and year.

Harvard's graduate guide explains the split: keep locations, dates and less important details on the right, and put the university, degree and job title on the left, where the eye starts. Use a right-aligned tab stop for the right column instead of spaces or a table, so the alignment survives the PDF export and is read in the right order by applicant tracking systems.

The bullets follow the template's own notes: begin each line with an action verb, quantify where possible, use no personal pronouns, and write phrases rather than full sentences. The paragraph template puts the same content into a short block of text and adds one rule: drop articles such as "a" and "the" so the description reads tightly.

Harvard's resume guidance for PhD students recommends a common font such as Times New Roman or Arial, a size between 10 and 12 point used consistently, and equal margins of at least half an inch. It says to avoid text boxes, underlining and shading. The current College Word templates are set in Calibri with margins of about half an inch.

On length, the same Harvard page says a resume is typically one to two pages at most, and that two pages are fine for doctoral candidates applying to jobs that require a PhD. Harvard's College sample resumes fit on one page, which suits undergraduates and most early-career applicants. If an employer asks for one page, send one page.

The College guide adds two layout rules: keep spacing, bold, italics and capitalization consistent, and use the same font on your resume and cover letter.

The Harvard College guide lists what to avoid: photos, age or gender, personal pronouns, abbreviations, narrative style, slang or colloquialisms, references, and starting each line with a date. The Extension School version gives the same list and allows abbreviations that are standard in your industry.

The template also has no objective or summary section. That works for students, whose education and activities do the introducing. If you have several years of work experience or are changing fields, a two-line summary under the header is a reasonable adaptation, but it is not part of Harvard's template.

Harvard names five common mistakes to check before you send anything: spelling and grammar errors, missing email or phone, passive language instead of action verbs, poor organization or length, and not showing results. It also asks you to avoid unexplained gaps, such as a missing summer.

Yes. Harvard's career office posts the bullet-point template as a Word file, an accessible Word file and a Google Docs copy, and the paragraph template as Word files. The sample resumes are PDFs. The full resume guide, which many people search for as a "Harvard resume guide PDF", is now a web page, while the graduate CV guide is still a PDF.

Write in Word or Google Docs, then export a PDF to apply unless the employer asks for a .docx. Harvard's guide reminds you to make sure the formatting translates properly to PDF, so open the exported file and look for shifted tabs or wrapped lines before you upload it.

Any single-column template with plain headings and right-aligned dates gives you the same structure. Two-column designs, icons and skill bars do not.

Harvard Business School lists a resume among the parts of its MBA written application, but its application process page does not publish a required template. Follow any instructions inside the application itself. An applicant with several years of work normally puts Experience first and Education second, which matches the Harvard guide's rule of ordering headings by importance.

A CV is a different document. Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences guide says a CV has no page limit and that most graduate student CVs run two to five pages. Its basic sections are contact information, education, research experience, teaching experience, publications, presentations, honors and awards, and references, which the guide says an academic CV should always include. The formatting advice matches the resume: a common font at 10 to 12 point and equal margins of half an inch to one inch.

For a Harvard-style CV template, start from the samples in that guide and follow your discipline's conventions; the guide notes that fields order their categories differently.

1. 1

   Get the template

   Download Harvard's bullet-point template in Word or Google Docs, or recreate the layout in any single-column template.

2. 2

   Fill in the header

   Name on the first line; address, email and phone on the second, separated by bullet characters. Use an email you check daily.

3. 3

   Write Education first

   School, location, degree, concentration and graduation date. Add GPA, honors or coursework only when they help for this job.

4. 4

   Add experience and activities newest first

   Two lines per entry (organization and location; title and dates), then two to four action-verb bullets with numbers where you have them.

5. 5

   Order sections by relevance

   If a leadership role or project matters more for this job than your work history, move that section above Experience, as the template suggests.

6. 6

   Proofread and export

   Check spelling, consistent formatting and dates, save as PDF, and open the file to confirm nothing shifted.

A resume laid out the way Harvard's bullet-point template is structured. The format works at any school; the person, school and employers are fictional and the numbers are illustrations.

Harvard's template asks for an action verb first, numbers where possible, no pronouns and phrases rather than sentences. Same fictional student, before and after.

• Resume Format Guide: How to Choose One
• College Student Resume Example and Writing Guide
• MBA Resume Example and Writing Guide
• CV vs resume
• Resume Action Verbs and Power Words, Grouped by Skill
• How to List Education on a Resume, With Examples

We opened every page below on that date. Pay, rules and requirements change, so check the source before you rely on a detail.

1. Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success: Harvard College Guide to Creating a Strong Resume (section content, formatting rules, what to avoid, common mistakes)
2. Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success: Harvard College Bullet Point Resume Template (section order, entry layout and bullet rules in the Word template)
3. Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success: Harvard College Paragraph Resume Template (paragraph-style entries; drop articles)
4. Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success: Create a Resume/CV or Cover Letter (template file formats (Word, Google Docs) and sample resume PDFs)
5. Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success: Harvard College Resume Example (Tech) (one-page sample, renamed headings, capitalized organization names)
6. Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success: Harvard College Resume Example (Engineering) (one-page junior sample with a field-specific heading)
7. Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success: Resumes and Cover Letters for PhD Students (one to two pages, common fonts, 10 to 12 point, half-inch margins)
8. Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success: CVs and Cover Letters (Harvard Griffin GSAS, 2025) (CV length, basic CV sections, left and right layout, margins)
9. Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success: HES: Create Impactful Resumes and Cover Letters (Extension School version of the avoid list)
10. Harvard Business School: MBA Application Process (resume listed as an application item; no template published)