As part of your application, you are required to upload a resume/CV. A resume is a concise summary of your skills, work and volunteer experience used when you look for work, while a CV is a longer form of your professional experience with a focus on academic history including publications, scholarships, and other academic achievements.
If you are applying to the course-based ehealth program and plan to do the 8-month internship in the industry, you should upload a resume (most people will choose this). Use the template that the ehealth program provides you and fill that in.
If you are applying to the thesis-based program and plan to do the 8-month internship in an academic research setting, you should upload a CV. You should use a CV template similar to what you would use to apply to research grants, not the resume template that the ehealth program provides.
Guide to preparing your resume
While the MSc ehealth program does not reveal how they evaluate your resume, it is fair to assume they are looking for traits and skills of a (future) ehealth professional. Do not simply copy and paste a resume you used for co-op, because it’s likely prepared in a different context and for a different goal.
For your application, you need to use the ehealth resume template from McMaster's website. In the table below, I have broken each section of the ehealth resume template down for you and written some tips for each section. Before you read the tips below, download the ehealth resume template and familiarize yourself on the sections – then come back to the table below for tips on filling out the template.
| Section | Tips |
|---|---|
| Education | You want to fill in the template as given in this section. For each scholarship / award you list in the bullet points, you want to provide a few words to describe award criteria. For instance, instead of just writing “President’s Scholar of Excellence Award – 2019” You should have: “President’s Scholar of Excellence Award (top 1% of all first-year entering class at University of Toronto) – 2019” Add any significant extracurriculars you pursued during your degree here. For example, if you were a Vice President at a student group for a year or longer, then you want to also include it here. Avoid adding any extracurriculars where you only spent little time or only participated on occasion. |
| Career Related Skills | To write the Career Related Skills section, you first need to know what ehealth career related skills are. Review the details of different ehealth career paths, and pick one or two career pathways that you feel your background and skills is most suited for and focus on listing skillset needed for these pathways. In so doing, you get to leave the impression to the admissions officer that you have deliberately considered different ehealth careers and are conscious of your own skills – which prepares you to work towards beginning (or advancing) your desired ehealth career. Take the Project Management pathway for instance, the job title for an intern would be Project Coordinator. For the “Career Related Skills” section of your resume, you would want to list soft skills and technical skills related to Project Management. Soft skills you need could be organized, detail-oriented, etc. Technical skills you would need could be Microsoft Project etc. |
| Work Experience | Imagine you’re applying to an internship position – you want to tailor your resume for entry level positions for your desired ehealth career pathway(s). List experiences that is relevant to the entry level position and align your descriptions to match or imitate what someone in your desired ehealth career would do. In your bullet points, provide details, including numbers, on things that measure success. In many places where there is "XXX" in the resume template, the admissions committee wants you to fill out a number. The deliberate inclusion of numeric metrics that measure your success in the admissions resume is very important. Let’s go back to our Project Management pathway example – if you picked Project Management pathway, for this section, you would list experiences where you coordinated or managed anything that are like “projects.” For example, coordinating an event for a club can be seen as a project. Even though that’s not a formal corporate (or healthcare) project, it demonstrates essential project management. In your bullet points, you would describe things you did that are similar to what project managers would do (see description on Project Management pathway). Finally, your success metrics to list in your bullet points could be something like “completed the club event with XXX participants on time and within XXX amount of budget.” If you don’t know the exact amount, you can provide an estimate. |
| Volunteer and Community Activities | The term “volunteer” in the heading of this section implies anything you list here are unpaid. The thing is, the skills, expertise, and perspectives you develop in any work regardless of pay are equally valuable to your professional growth. That’s why you want to treat this section with equal attention to “Work Experience” section. In fact, you may even modify the template a little and just have a single combined section called “Experience” that includes both your paid and unpaid work. |
| Activities and Interests | Here, you want to list some casual activities to reveal some of your life outside of work – and show that you are able to de-stress and manage a work-life balance. If you have special achievements in your hobbies, that would be nice to include here as well. |
After you have finished writing your resume, you want to ensure that your language is professional, accurate, and free of errors. A good resume will generally take several rounds of edits and revisions. It’s always good to have another pair of eyes look over your resume to make sure there are no obvious room for improvement and that it’s suited for the ehealth program – I’m available to help you with that from my 1-on-1 MSc ehealth application editing service.
What you should include on your CV
For thesis-based applicants, you will want to highlight your academic merit and your ability to pursue in independent research, so it makes more sense to submit a CV with your application.
Your CV should reflect your area of academic expertise. You want the experiences you list on your CV to be consistent with the topic you selected for your Research Statement. You should not limit your CV to only 2 pages, rather it should be as long as necessary to cover all your academic experience, including conferences, speaking events, publications, grants, scholarships, awards, etc.
It would make sense to write your CV as if your target audience is a potential MSc ehealth thesis supervisor. It actually may very well be the case for supervisors who are currently accepting ehealth thesis students to be evaluating your CV for admissions.