Letters of Recommendation, Requirements and Considerations
Professor Lisa Roney
University of Central Florida
I am happy to write letters of recommendation that are honest assessments of your abilities and work habits. I will do so under the following conditions only.
• I will only write letters for you when you waive access to those letters. This is not so much because I do not want you to know what I think of you; in fact, if I do not have a good opinion of you I will refuse to write a letter. However, any institution to which you are applying will not give as much credence to a recommendation that is not confidential. In addition, even if you are my best student ever, I do not like the idea of you comparing your letter’s content with those of other students, who may or may not have received as glowing a report.
• Under most circumstances, I will not write a letter of recommendation unless you have taken at least two courses with me. Though I will consider it if I’ve had one course with you, just remember that when I haven’t known you very long or very well, then I do not have the material to make a detailed or confident assessment of your character and abilities, even if you did well in that one class.
• You should consider whether or not I am the best person to write your letter. If you want to discuss the different possible recommenders on your list, I’ll be happy to go through that list with you and identify who will probably be best. Please remember that if you have not received A’s from me, I will have to explain that in my letter.
• Please note that I require a bit of time to write such letters. While I am certainly willing to try to put something together on short notice in a genuine emergency (you just got a last-minute job opportunity), I can always do better with notice, and grad school deadlines are very predictable. I will seldom agree to write letters for grad school when asked after December 1. (See more info below.)
• Also be aware that letters of recommendation are not usually the focus when your application is reviewed. Your writing sample and statement of purpose will be much more important than any recommendation letter. And even if your work is good and you have very fine recommendation letters, you may still not get in to graduate school, as it is highly competitive.
Required Materials
In order for me to write a letter for you, please provide me with a single packet (not a piece here and there, and not with supplements sent via email) containing the following:
1) All the requisite forms, properly filled out and signed by you.
2) A list of the places you are applying that includes the deadlines for letters at each school, the particular degree (M.A., M.F.A., Ph.D.), and the particular program (for example, “Creative Nonfiction” or “American Literature” or “Texts and Technology”; please note that this is important because different types of programs might need a different approach, and you don’t want me misnaming the program in the letter, which could only annoy application reviewers). Include any programs that use online forms that will be emailing me separately.
3) A draft (doesn’t have to be complete) of your personal statement. It is best if you have discussed with me your goals and reasons for wanting to go on to graduate school, which is not a decision to be taken lightly. I absolutely cannot write a good letter for you if I do not understand your motivations for wanting to go to graduate school.
4) A copy of your resume, including jobs and extracurricular activities. Here’s a site on resumes: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/pw/p_yresum.html.
5) A copy of your transcript or audit, including information about your GPA.
6) A statement of what you remember accomplishing and doing well in my courses; in other words, what it is you think that I might say about you, even including particular interactions. What do you think are your strengths as a student and a writer/scholar? What do you think are your weaknesses and what are you doing to address those?
7) A list of any other factors I might address—in particular, whether you’ve overcome any difficulties or excelled in ways that might not be obvious from your record.
8) If there has been a semester or more’s gap between your work with me and the time of the letter, please include a short writing sample, so I can refresh my memory about your style.
Resources for Applying to Graduate School
You will want to identify programs that offer concentrations you are interested in, that employ as teachers writers/scholars you admire, and that give you financial support in the way of tuition releases and/or graduate assistantships and fellowships. No one will do the research for you to find the right programs. So start this early. Know what you want and what it’s realistic for you to expect. If you are applying for top schools, also include a couple of “safety schools.”
Once you know where you’d like to apply, one way you can impress anyone who is writing letters for you is to provide them with an already well-done personal statement or statement of purpose that you are including in your applications. Please don’t rely too heavily on faculty members in writing this, though we are usually happy to give an opinion or suggestions for improvement. There are numerous sources of help:
• Directories. Petersen’s and the Princeton Review regularly publish directories of graduate programs with rankings and descriptions of a variety of programs. The Princeton Review has one that is particularly on programs in the Arts and Sciences. In addition, the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) publishes a directory of M.F.A. programs.
• University websites. Once you have identified some programs that sound good to you, read up on those programs on their websites. You can usually gather a good deal of information about how much support they offer, who is on the faculty and what they do and how much time they spend teaching, what becomes of their graduates, and so forth.
• How-to books and websites. There are hundreds of websites, but the ones below are the better ones I have seen. Always remember that these are GENERAL and so some differences may apply in your particular field or situation.
Richard Stelzer. How to Write a Winning Personal Statement for Graduate and Professional School.
Donald Asher. Graduate Admissions Essays: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why.
Eileen Mager, ed. Get Into Graduate School: A Strategic Approach.
http://www.essayedge.com/graduate/essayadvice/course/ (note that these folks have a pay editing service, which I am not recommending, but their detailed instructions are helpful)
http://career.berkeley.edu/Grad/GradStatement.stm
http://depts.washington.edu/engl/advising/gradschool/gradapply.html
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/pw/p_refrequest.html
If there are problems in your record, and yet you’ve decided you do ultimately want to attend graduate school, you should talk with me or other faculty members about strategies to make up for problems. However, don’t expect this to be easy or instant. For instance, you might need to take further courses on a non-degree basis, without admission to a program, in order to prove yourself.
Unless you are place-bound by family, professional, or other considerations, it is best that you attend graduate school somewhere different from your undergraduate university. In that way, you will have new perspectives on your work and will avoid a syndrome of feeling as though your graduate program is somehow a continuation of your undergraduate experience. Also, you need to understand that, just because you graduated successfully from UCF’s undergraduate creative writing program, you will not necessarily be accepted into the MFA program. A different set of criteria apply.
Always remember to talk to faculty members as early as you get an inkling that you want to attend graduate school. Their advice and contacts can be invaluable.
|
