Letters

Letters of Recommendation

While I’m happy to write a recommendation letter for you, there are some things you should know that will help you get the best letter you can from me and, consequently, maximize the probability of getting what you’re trying to get. It is my firm belief that solid recommendation letters can open doors that your GPA cannot, so use this to your advantage. (In what follows, I’ll organize my thoughts under the assumption that you want a letter for grad school, though you can easily adjust the ideas if you’re thinking about a letter for a job or an internship.)

Think about the following three sets of questions:

Did you take a course with me? Did you get a good grade? Did you make a good impression?

All recommendation letters include something like “… s/he took a course with me … and did great.” What’s the marginal contribution of that information? Zero. Here’s where the “good impression” bit becomes critical. Almost any good student can get a good grade. Great students make a good impression. Did you ask a lot of questions inside and outside of class? Did you come to office hours (and talked about relevant things, i.e., economics)? Did you manage to convince me that you were putting a lot of effort in class? Did you talk to me about research ideas you got from class? Did you ask me about how to connect the real world and the stuff from class?

It’s hard for me (or anyone, for that matter) to write things that will get you into grad school if you only spent 13 weeks in one of my courses and you were the quiet student in the back row whose name I don’t really remember. A great recommendation letter involves some degree of “closeness” between the letter writer and the student that cannot happen if you’re the quiet student I talked about above. People (both in grad school and in any other association) want to know a lot of things about you (the ones you can’t get from Facebook): what’s your research agenda, what are your ideas, what are your strengths and weaknesses (weaknesses are important too; any letter that says a student doesn’t have any weakness will be disregarded immediately), how do you handle life and pressure, how did you solve (or cope with) difficult things that got along the way, and so on. Remember: every letter will say that the student is (academically) impressive. So what’s the set of things that will distinguish you from everyone else?

Did you do research in the course? Did I supervise some of your research, even if it’s not on a course of mine? Did I guide an independent studies session with you?

(While this is mostly critical for grad school, it’s still important for recommendation letters in general.) The goal of grad school is to turn you into a researcher. If you have research experience (hands-on, economic research experience at the level of a capstone or an honors thesis) then people would like to read about it. If you have ideas for future projects (even if you haven’t started them), that counts for creativity and people would like to know about this too. As a letter writer, I want to be able to say something beyond “… and s/he wrote a term paper in econometrics, though I don’t know what it was about.” Research is a long (and painful) process that can be an extremely useful signaling tool. If I can’t say a lot about your research skills, you should ask another professor who can actually say something meaningful about it.

Do I know that you want me to write a letter for you? When did you tell me about it? Do I know everything I need to know about the process?

This may not be obvious, but asking for a letter one week before the deadline is not going to happen. It’s not personal: I just cannot produce something that will have the required quality in such a short amount of time. Ideally, I would want to know about it no less than three months before the deadline. Moreover, the letter could benefit from me getting: [a] as much information you can provide about the program(s) you’re applying to, [b] a copy of your CV (preferably, the same one you will submit to the program), [c] a copy of your statement of purpose (or cover letter if you’re applying for a job), and [d] anything else you think will help me write a great letter (examples: conversations you remember having, ideas we bounced around, anecdotes about “good impressions” from class, etc.).

Questions? Comments? Send me an e-mail or stop by office hours.

Last updated: 06/03/2022.