Friday, December 4, 2009

A Recommendation for your recommendation letters

All graduate programs will require you to submit 2-3 recommendation letters as a part of your application. If you are still studying, you'll probably have to ask your professors for recommendations. Choose professors with better qualifications or teachers who taught courses related to the field you plan to specialize in. An external project guide might also be a good person to ask as well, to show some diversity in your references. If you have started working, you'll probably want to ask at least one person from work for a reference. Here are a few tips for your recommendations:

Access to recommendation letters
Most universities will allow you to choose to keep access to the recommendation letters. If you are not sure whether one of your references will write a good letter for you, it might be worthwhile to keep access to the letter. You could then delete the letter and substitute it with the letter from another recommender if needed.

Writing your own recommendations
A lot of your recommenders are probably busy people. They may ask you to give them a rough draft of the recommendation. So you do have some control over the content of the recommendation. If you need to write drafts for all 3 letters, it might make sense to ask your parents/friends to write some of the letters so that there is some variation in the language or tone of the writing.