For many professors, fall is the season for writing letters of recommendation
Fall semester in a college town is largely synonymous in the public’s mind today with football. For many professors, however, fall also is the season of letters. Specifically, it is the season of writing letters of recommendation for undergraduate students aspiring to and applying for all varieties of graduate and professional programs.
There is, of course, no mandate — not yet, at least — that we pen these missives on behalf of students. We’re not paid by the letter, as it were, and if we didn’t write any at all, there’d likely be no negative repercussions in our annual reviews.
The time-honored aphorism “publish or perish,” after all, relates to scholarly productivity as measured mostly by articles and books, not by efforts to enhance an undergraduate’s prospect of moving on to a master’s program or law school. And crafting a great letter — one rich in details beyond a student’s letter grade — can take significant time away from writing those scholarly articles.
Yet, writing letters can prove to be one of the most personally gratifying, albeit implicit and unspoken, parts of the job. That is especially true when they are done for students who stand out from the pack for any one of many reasons, stretching from stellar grades to hard work and determined diligence, and from overcoming hardships and obstacles to outstanding in-class participation.
The problem for many students that I have found over the years is that when it comes time to find professors to write on their behalf, they simply don’t know any professors well enough to have them write truly strong letters. If all that a professor can attest to is that a student earned an “A” in her class, then that doesn’t add much, if any, value to an application. The student’s “A” grade already is reflected on a transcript and factored into the student’s GPA.
My advice for incoming first-year students thus is to get to know at least three full-time professors reasonably well by the end of their junior year. They can do that in multiple ways.
For example, they might do it by volunteering to assist professors with their research and writing projects, by coming to office hours and asking informed questions that demonstrate having done the assigned readings and attended lectures, by actively participating during in-class discussions in an insightful manner and even by becoming undergraduate teaching assistants for a course they took during their first two or three years of college.
It is relatively easy for undergraduates to remain anonymous at a large university if they so choose. Furthermore, the possibility of attending graduate school certainly seems a long way off when viewed from the perspective of entering undergraduates during their first semesters of study. The pandemic, with in-person classes shifting to online and hybrid formats, has made it all that much easier for students to fly under the professorial radar.
The reward for professors in writing recommendation letters isn’t reflected in paychecks. Rather, it arrives in the form of unsolicited, out-of-the-blue emails from former students who now are in graduate school and who write to let you know about their accomplishments and career plans or to ask you for further advice.
Highlights of my fall semester thus far are such emails from two former students — both served as an undergraduate teaching assistants and research assistants for me — who are in top-tier law schools. Amidst the usual flood of emails, these stand out and are ones that I actually wanted to read.
Letters of recommendation, of course, typically don’t play a huge part in admission decisions for most students. For students applying to law school, for example, cumulative undergraduate grade-point averages and LSAT scores often, but not always, do the initial heavy lifting on an application. But recommendation letters do play a role and particularly so in close admission cases.
It’s never too early for undergraduates to start planning ahead and lining up prospective letter writers.
Clay Calvert is the Joseph L. Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication and a professor of law at the University of Florida.
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This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Clay Calvert: Fall is the season for writing letters of recommendation
