A Recommendation for your Recommendation Letters

An important part of your applications to grad school include 2-3 recommendations. Universities prefer references from your teachers, who have some idea about your academic ability, but if you have work experience you can get references from your supervisors at work too. Here are a few suggestions about recommendation letters.

1. Get recommendations from the most qualified people
If you have a choice between references with a PhD and without a PhD, it should help to choose more qualified teachers. People assume that more qualified people are smarter.

2. Do some volunteer work
I volunteered to help in the organization of 2 technical festivals in college. That helped me get one of my recommendations. Also you develop more material to put in the letter, if you can point to some of the positive attributes that the teacher might have learnt about you through the event. Volunteer for part-time projects with your teachers. May be they need someone to code something for their own research. It doesn't hurt to ask. It shows initiative.

3. Get recommendations for your best courses
If you have done well at all the courses you took with a certain professor, definitely ask them for a recommendation. If the courses are related to the field you are applying for, it will definitely help your case.

4. Vary styles
If you have been asked to write all 3 of your recommendations, try to vary the style of the letter. Ask your father to write a letter for you based on some points, use different indentation , sizes of paragraphs. It shouldn't appear that you have written all 3 recommendations. Obviously you should vary the content as well. Again in this case it helps if you did many different things so that you have different things to talk about in the 3 letters and the SOP. Trust me 4 full pages is a lot of space to fill up.

5. Work for a well-known company
They say that if a professor in America reads a recommendation letter from a person he/she knows and respects, you are assured admission. If that isn't a possibility, do work for a company he may know, to improve your chances. This does favor the large companies like IBM, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Intel...

6. Talk about your projects
Work from your final year or third year project is another good topic to allude to in the reference letters.

7. Mention percentiles
Say whether you were in the top 2%, 5% or 10% of the class even for particular courses if the numbers look impressive. Ranks and percentiles make you stand out of the crowd.