Funding in CVs

[qkhitai]

Naturally people list their funding and awards on their CVs, but should you list the values? For example: '2017, McAwesome Scholarship for Incredible Students, $1,000,000'. Or should you just list the name of the funding (and institution/agency etc)? I have some acquaintances who list the full values, but others who don't. Is it tactless to list how much they are worth, or is it beneficial? I'm in the process of revising mine and I'll be receiving two awards this year. I know the value of one, but the other is ambiguous and I don't know the actual amount. For the sake of consistency I was planning on leaving out the values.

Also, as an addendum, should you list funding you decline? This seems reasonably common, but I just wanted to double check.

[TakeruK]

I have mixed feelings about showing the amount. When I applied to US PhD programs, I did list the amounts because the names of the Canadian fellowships are not well known to US professors and I wanted to show that I basically received the equivalent of a NSF grad fellowship in Canada during my Masters. I also see amounts on CVs of "soft money" positions (faculty-like positions) to show things like how much grant money they can bring in. I only included awards that are worth a significant chunk of my stipend, i.e. $10,000 or more (because the point is to show that you have been externally funded in the past), or awards that are prestigious but carry no monetary value.

For this past year, when applying to postdoc positions, I opted to go for a much more simple CV (like the ones professors and postdocs in my field have) and basically removed all descriptors on almost everything. So the dollar values got removed this time. In the future, I think grad school awards would be obsolete in my CV so I probably will not include those dollar values, however, if I am a PI or co-PI on a future grant, I would probably include it.

In your case, I think you should leave out the dollar values since you don't know the amount of the second award. If you only included one, it would seem like the second one was not worth money.

As for declined funding, I would only list them if you could have actually accepted the money but had to decline since you already received other funding etc. For example, if you applied to 3 PhD programs and got a University-specific fellowship from all three so you could only accept one, I would not list the other two fellowships since there's no way you could have accepted them since you declined their admission offer. However, if you win a national-level fellowship but your school funding is better and precludes you from accepting the national fellowship, then yes, definitely show that it was declined. Or, if you win multiple national-level fellowships and can only accept one, etc.

[Humulus_lupulus]

I have a "proposals funded" section on my CV because I received over $22,000 of funding from various sources as an undergrad for my research (one being a $10,000 grant my senior year). In this case, I like to include these awards because it shows my ability to write proposals for significant amounts of money at a time where most students do not.

Other awards, like scholarships and whatnot, I do not include dollar amounts. Generally, the well-known fellowships don't need it, and smaller departmental/university stuff tends to be $2,000 or less. Unless it is not a well-known award for a significant amount of money that you had to go through a rigorous application process for, I'd say dollar amounts don't say as much as the award name and maybe a brief description.

[qkhitai]

Thank you both for the comprehensive answers, that's ace!

[fuzzylogician]

I give the fellowship/grant name, a short description, and a dollar amount for large amounts (over $5000). I try to make sure that the name + details aren't more than 2 lines per entry. I separate internal from external grants -- both so there is no deception and it's easy to separate the more competitive from the less competitive awards, and also because with time I expect not to list as many (or any) of them, at some point. 

[RydraWong]

Hi sorry to hijack this thread but I had a question along the same lines. I've recently received a Fulbright ETA grant but I think I will end up declining that in order to accept a fellowship from a PhD program and to start my program in the fall. Would it be acceptable to still list the Fulbright ETA on my CV as declined, like putting it as "Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Grant (declined), 2017-2018." I know the Fulbright ETA isn't as prestigious as the research grant and that a lot of the benefit of it comes from actually doing it and the cultural exchange aspect, but I did put a lot of work into my app and I feel like it's still an accomplishment to be selected so is it worth it to put on my CV?