Structure of a Perfect Letter of Recommendation (LOR).
Get in here!!!. Short thread🧵
Get in here!!!. Short thread🧵
1.Length: somewhere between .75 and 1.5 pages
2. It all comes down to one characteristic: Evidence that you can do research or at least have strong potential to do so. The best indicator here is your undergraduate terminal project, so you'll want to focus on that! In particular:
2. It all comes down to one characteristic: Evidence that you can do research or at least have strong potential to do so. The best indicator here is your undergraduate terminal project, so you'll want to focus on that! In particular:
a. description of project - some background and technical details. This should be approachable for an outsider, so perhaps descriptions of the genesis of the project (e.g. a long-standing missing piece of your prof's ongoing project;
a. Diversion-but-interesting pet project that the prof couldn't justify using grant-funded students on; a project of your own interest and design), what makes it technically interesting in the context of the field, and what work had to be done to complete it.
b. Your key individual contributions and the level they were at (should be able to compare with other students who have completed their final projects and ended up in graduate school, or even perhaps against masters students from the school, etc.)
c. Significance of its results, i.e. groundbreaking result (unlikely), solved an extant problem, solved a special case of an extant problem, posed a new interesting problem, etc.
d. Artifact/product, in approximately descending order: stand-alone paper already accepted, standalone paper submitted, publishable thesis not yet transformed into a paper, the result that will be incorporated into a broader paper, a notable undergrad thesis
3. LORs are discipline-specific and highly personal, so it might be hard to find good examples.
COPIED.
Letter of recommendation samples
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