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Writing Recommendation Letter
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23 Aug 2020, 10:41
In some of the cases recommenders ask the candidate to share a small write up so as to aid them in writing LOR. Below is the selected section from a beautiful work on writing LORs, pls go through and get benefitted.
1. When I'm on the committee, I try to read every application; when I chair it, I make sure I do, some multiple times. That's many hundreds of applications in under a month. Factor in lots and lots of late letters, classes, etc., and it's clear I have to work pretty fast.
For the first pass—deciding whether the application deserves more time or not—I can afford to spend no more than about 6-7 minutes per application. (Keep in mind I've read maybe a few thousand applications, so I've had practice.) If I decide the application is promising, I may spend over half an hour (in some cases, days!) on it. But in those first 6-7 minutes, I have to:
. eyeball the student's research record
. form a summary of the transcript
. glance at the standardized test scores
. determine whether the statement is promising
. get the gist of 2-3 letters of recommendation
. In practice, that means I have about one minute to devote to the first reading of your letter. Now think about whether your letter works in this context. (For instance, some letter writers put a big, prominent paragraph of boilerplate legalese at the beginning of their letter, which I have to read before I realize it's irrelevant. Could you have buried that in a postscript? Was that the best use of my minute?)
Call this the One-Minute Rule and write, read, and re-read your letter against this rule before sending it in.
2. If you take away just one piece of concrete advice, let it be this.
The single biggest problem with most letters is that they are filled with abstract generalities and infinitives. If we don't know you or your institution, we can't judge what any of these statements mean relative to our standards. Always consider the illustrative anecdote:
Due to deadline pressure, I asked him to grow a pumpkin in just one month. As you know it takes over 100 days to grow a pumpkin, but over the weekend he devised a new method to accelerate their growth. On Monday morning I arrived to find not just a pumpkin but a steaming, flavorful pie.
Anecdote about acts of raw coding are only so helpful in understanding research potential, but they're better than nothing (see the section on Corporate Letters, below). An extra book or paper they read, and demonstrated understanding of (again, be concrete about why you believe this), goes a long way.
3. Tell us a little about your background. A brief para of bio-sketch never hurts. If you publish papers, tell us where. But keep it short: the letter is about the student, not you!
Ultimately, remember two things:
Your most valuable resource is your credibility. If you are a credible letter-writer, we will take you at your word and, if one day you tell us about a stellar student, we will do everything we can to make room for her. But credibility is one-way: hard to acquire, easy to lose.
You can't get a student in, but you can make a student not get in. That is, there is only so much you can say to get a student admitted, but if we come to distrust your letter, your next student is going to have a much harder time getting in. For “you”, substitute your institution also.
Excerpt from Advice to Graduate School Recommendation Letter Writers: Shriram Krishnamurthi