AkshayK95
I am looking to apply for R1 intake Fall 2020.
About Letters of Recommendation: Are there any specific topics/questions that they have to be based on?
Hi Akshay,
Most schools provide specific prompts for your recommenders to answer. You'll need to look at the applications themselves to find out what those specific questions are. Sometimes applicants can't see the recommender portion of the app because it's only available to the recommenders in a recommender portal. If that's the case, you can generally find out the recommender questions with some online sleuthing.
Below is are some tips &
Admissionado resources that have been helpful to our clients in the past re LORs that I hope you will also find useful:
1. You should not be writing your own letters of recommendation. Not only is this unethical, it's also likely to result in a less authentic and less effective deliverable to the AdCom. Second year MBA students serving as admissions fellows will tell you that they can tell who has written their LOR themselves. Instead, you should provide your recommenders with an outline of your specific deliverables and character traits while reporting to them (most schools ask for at least one of your recs to be from a direct manager) or working with them (it's usually fine for your second recommender to be a superior who knows your work but does not/has not formally managed you). This outline should be a list of specific contributions and their impact and remind them of the stories that best illustrate what you perceive to be THEIR best perception of you.
2. Make sure to be as specific as possible when quantifying impact in the outline you provide to your recommenders (e.g., XYZ efforts resulted in X% year-over-year increase in sales or X% reduction in costs or X new hires or X new customers worth $XMM in revenue, mentored 2 summer interns who thrived under your tutelage and have since joined the firm full-time, coordinated a friendly but fierce competition among company divisions to raise $X for XYZ local worthy charity, etc.). Also make sure to designate times when you led a team or led a project and the specific challenges overcome in those efforts so that they can expand on those areas in their own words. You should make sure that your outlines are recommender-specific. It's fine to have some overlap, but you don't want both of your recommenders to be focusing on the exact same character-traits and achievements. More that below.
3. If you have the option to have 2 or more recommenders, you should pick recommenders who can talk to different attributes of your candidacy. For instance, if you work in a heavily-quantitative finance job and you are a superior model-builder, you don't want both of your recommenders to sing your praises on an individual-contributor data analysis level. It's okay if one focuses on huge models that you built from scratch but you want the other to then focus on how you had to manage projects in which massive amounts of messy data has to be wrangled or how you were a data science mentor to less-tenured staff or how you used data to tell a story that convinced senior management of a previously unknown reality. You need to make sure that your recommenders aren't saying the exact same things because every word in the app is precious for the 3D image of you they need to create for the AdCom. Both recommenders should hit on your technical skills, leadership skills and professional potential, but it's natural recommenders to focus on one area more than another based on the side of you they have the most experience with.
4. If you are worried about asking your current recommender to write you a rec for fear or retaliation over you potentially leaving, then it's usually fine to have a former manager recommend you instead.
5. Approach your targeted recommenders as early as possible and have the outline ready to present to them at that time. That way if they ask you to write the recommendation for them, you can hand them the outline instead - following up with an emailed soft copy - so that they have great content at the ready and they don't need to look up numbers or get back to you on specifics. You've taken out some of the guesswork for them by having content at-the-ready but have the benefit of a genuine and unique rec.
We've put out some resources that may be helpful re LOCs here:
1. A blog post about WHO should be writing your LOR:
https://admissionado.com/blog/mba/who-s ... mendation/2. Our Letters of Recommendation Guide which distills our do's-and-don'ts and elaborates further on the subject:
https://admissionado.com/free-consultat ... sultation/ Making sure that candidates ace the LOR portion of the app is something we do everyday. If talking to one of our MBA admissions strategy consultants may be helpful for you as you navigate this challenge, feel free to reach out for a free consultation here:
https://admissionado.com/free-consultat ... sultation/ Including as much information as possible about yourself into this form will help us give you the best possible advice in the consultation.
Nov 20
19 Oct 2019, 03:08
