CV: What counts as relevant work experience?

[Hijojo]

So, I'm working on my CV for my applications and I'm having a bit of trouble deciding what to put on it. I've already included the obvious (research assistant, TA, etc) and excluded the clearly irrelevant (that random Political Science position), but I'm not sure what to do to about the things that fall into the middle - they could be seen as relevant, but they're not directly related to my field. 

 

All of them are teaching experiences of various kinds - working in natural history museum, literacy mentoring - to name two of the things I'm not sure about. Do people here have opinions how directly related to one's field something should be? What about when schools specifically ask about teaching experience? I suspect I'm overthinking this and I should include them, but I'm not sure.

 

Also possibly relevant: I'm talking in a couple SOPs about the fact that I usually worked multiple part-time jobs as an undergraduate (UC Irvine, for example, specifically asks about it). If I want to keep that consistent with my CV, including them might be a good idea. 

 

Thoughts?

[TakeruK]

I found it helpful to partition my life into three areas: Research Experience, Teaching/Outreach Experience, and Other Service.

 

I use something like these three areas on my CV.

 

In Research Experience, I put the obvious stuff--paid or volunteer research position for professors or other employers.

 

For teaching/outreach experience, I put anything where I communicated science to an audience. So, TA positions go here. My tutoring experience goes here (I worked for my undergrad school to teach review lectures -- but I didn't include my private one-on-one tutoring positions). I also volunteered to teach classes in many topics (some related to my field, some not) to a youth group that I used to be part of, so that went there too. Finally, I volunteered a bit with my school's observatory / public outreach nights.

 

For "other", I put things like leadership roles in student organizations (TA union, undergrad physics society, grad student government) and also non-academic things like leadership roles in community organizations (youth groups, community service groups etc.) A few academic things (e.g. organizing undergrad student conference, editorial board for an undergrad research journal) went here as well. 

 

In my opinion, although I keep my "work" or "research" section strictly for things related to my field, I think it's important for me to include all of the other stuff I spend my time on. One reason is to show that I have a diverse skillset. I think it's just as important for a scientist to be a good communicator or a good leader as well as a good researcher. I use this section to demonstrate that I am able to manage both people as well as complex data sets. Another reason is to show what's important to me. I am the type of person that really wants to be involved in their community and that means I spend a lot of my time on non-academic things. I want to signal to schools that I won't be happy if I spent all of my time on research and if they are looking for that, they should find such a student in someone else!

[Hijojo]

Thanks! That seems like a useful way to split up your CV - I haven't thought about it in quite those terms before, but I may adopt something like that. I like the idea of putting the various other activities you do on the CV - I usually edit those positions out, but I like the idea of demonstrating some balance instead of single-minded focus.