@JacobBaska I want to include synopses of relevant research projects I conducted throughout college in my law school applications. However, I can't figure out if I should include the synopses in a CV or PDF. The first option puts my resume and research in one tidy place but the document goes over the 1-page standard for recent college graduates. Conversely, the second option separates my resume and research but at least then my resume will be a single page. Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you!
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In general, you shouldn't give an admissions office something that they didn't ask for. In this case, providing a PDF to describe your research (basically like a "Here's my research" document) is not something that the school asked for. Avoid that!
If you feel strongly about wanting to give some more information about your research projects, you can either 1) just give one or two bullet points on your resume (this is usually enough to suffice because your audience are probably not experts in your given research area so just giving a high level overview is ok), or 2) a brief note on the addenda ("I wanted to take the opportunity to tell you a little more about an item on my resume.").
And with the issue of going on to a second page - that's not really a problem. If you go on to a second page but it's all "mission critical" material and it's well formatted, that's just how it goes!
@JacobBaska I see! To confirm, say I have a single sentence description for each project, I have 10 projects, and examples of projects may be a podcast for a legal seminar or a semester-long research project—I do a 2-page CV?
@Princess That's fine! But let me also ask the question - if I am a layman, do I really need a one sentence description? For example, if your senior thesis was "From Runway to the Guillotine: French Fashion on the Eve of the Revolution," the title kinda says it all, right? In the case of a scientific paper or poster presentation, the real key I need to know is that you did the paper/presentation. I don't need to know what it was about and it would take a while for me to understand what it was about. So take that insight for what it's worth, but you probably don't need to be as detailed as you think.
@JacobBaska You make interesting points! So you'd rather see me list the title of a project, 'Uncertainty and the Macroeconomy,' and not include the description, "Simulated Federal Reserve policy responses in Matlab, and empirically evaluated how economic uncertainty influences investment during periods of economic growth and recession, refining skills in macroeconomic modeling and policy evaluation?"
@Princess I mean this with the utmost respect because I know that project required a lot of work ... however ... I have a layman's understanding of macro economic principles and your one sentence description of your project didn't necessarily tell me any more or less than the title did. This would be totally different if you were speaking to your people (like a grad program in Econ or a job with a consulting firm).
@JacobBaska I appreciate your advice! Do you think schools will want to know the distinction between whether projects are podcasts, presentations, reports etc. or no? Also, do you think I should include or not include the project titles if that means I'd go onto 2 pages?
I feel like we're digging more into the weeds here! So taking a step back, the only research projects I typically recommend putting on a resume would be a senior/capstone thesis at the undergrad level, any masters thesis, a PhD thesis, or any significant research that was published in a journal. That's admittedly broad advice! But these are also all significant projects. I leave it to your discretion if something else also crosses that line of significant. For example, I'm seeing a lot of high school and college students being required to make a multi-episode podcast as part of an assignment. These are projects more akin to a five-ish page paper - important but not a huge deal. Other podcast projects last for an academic year and have lots of episodes. I'd say that the former is not on the resume and the latter should be. But - again - I leave it to the applicant's discretion if they feel like it's significant.
That response is very insightful! You note an assignment may not be relatively significant. Do you consider a midterm/final a significant enough project to include?
Unless it's something truly outlandish that would be the equivalent of a thesis (so let's start at 50 pages), no, I would not consider a midterm/final paper to be "significant."
https://hls.harvard.edu/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/jdapplicants/application-toolkit/resume/#resume-workshop