Letters of Recommendation
Two big things you need to know about letters of recommendation. The first is that you need more than one letter one time, and you letter needs to tell the readers a lot more about you than you might expect from work letters. The second, is that letters of recommendation are not a favor that you earn from your professors, they are part of our job.
Tackling the first one, when you are applying to graduate school your letters of recommendation are a piece of the picture that you are building for the readers. They need to have a lot more information than what you might typically expect from a letter from a job. The letters, ideally, should contribute to the story you are trying to tell your readers about who you are, what you are capable of, and the skills you bring to the new program.
As professors, we want to write you a letter that covers all of that, but we need your help. Each year we have hundreds of students so the chances are good that while we want to help you, we don’t remember a ton of detail about what you did in our class or the particulars of your background. What that means is that you need to help give us as much information as possible. That can mean coming to office hours, it can mean giving us a package of your application materials and cluing us into what you want your readers to take away.
For the second point, I know that student often think of letters of recommendation as gifts from on hight that professors grant to only their most impressive students. I thought the same thing when I was a student. It makes sense, we see that narrative in movies or shows all the time. But the reality is that professors are much more likely to see letters of recommendation as part of their job description, a service that we offer as professors. That doesn’t mean we will automatically say yes to whoever asks, many times professors will want to know more about your goals, your background and what type of letter you need before they agree. But more likely than not your professors are not going to deny you based on your GPA, or your class ranking or the fact that you haven’t won a Nobel prize (yet). As professors, we have had to ask for a hundred letters of recommendation to get where we are, and writing them for you is a small way that we can return the favor.
What all this means is that the letter process might be a lot less intimidating than you made it out to be in your head. SO GO TALK TO YOUR PROFESSORS!
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