letters of recommendation
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mdv ...@hotmail.com
Dear readers, I am planning on applying for a PhD position at about 8-10 schools around the end of this year. I don't foresee much problems getting decent letters of recommendation. However, I'd feel bad having to ask my recommenders to write 8-10 letters each adressed to a different school. I'd much rather ask for 8-10 copies of a general letter not adressed to any school in particular.
My question is: do schools perceive a letter of recommendation not explicitly adressed to them as bad or do they not care ?
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Arthur Sowers arthu...@magpage.com
email and post....
On 28 Apr 2001 mdv...@hotmail.com wrote: It is not clear whether you are applying for a post PhD job or you are applying to become a graduate student at one of those schools. Please explain further. I shall ***ume the latter because if you have received, or will soon receive, that degree then you would have already gotten some advice on this issue from your professors.
Ask for both. Have a personal discussion with your recommenders and tell them about this problem and then ask them to suggest how to handle this problem. There are some people out there who will give you a general idea of how to do this that will be very different from what other people will tell you. Let each person you plan to use as a recommender tell you what you should do, then apply that instruction to _just that person_. Do whatever they suggest. Equally important is _how_ they make suggestions to you. You might get hints about the _quality_ of recommendation that they would give you and for how long or how many requests they will be willing to do this and this might affect how you use those recommenders.
I think it also depends on who _reads_ the letters and what they expect.
The conventional wisdom is that they want to get the letter addressed to them and receive it by mail independently from you.
However, if you ask your letter writers if they would be comfortable adding a sentence or two inviting the reader to call them (giving phone number and time and day of week to call), most readers will be re***ured that _you_ didn't write the letter. Another factor which is somewhat controversial is whether your writer should only write positive comments or a mixture of strengths and weaknesses followed by something like "but I would strongly wish this person to work with me in the future" etc., or whatever.
One question you should bring up with your letter writers is how comfortable they would be letting you read what you would write about you.
You are putting them "on the spot" by asking them this, but you have to know that their work will either help or hurt you. You should get an idea how they feel about you early in this conversation and get signals during the conversation that they are enthusiastic and encouraging about your plans. If they are cool, then you may not be getting as warm of a letter as will help you. Remember, a neutral letter is almost as bad as a letter that says you are a poor student.
Again, the best thing you can do is contact (if you have not done this already) your recommenders and explain your future plans/dreams and get their reaction. You should eliminate anyone who not enthusiastic or otherwise excited about your plans/dreams.
You should have a look at my website which deals with PhD career paths and gives other information that should be of interest to you.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD -----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: | | http://www.magpage.com/~arthures | -----------------------------------------
=== no change to below, included for reference and context ====
"Jeffrey J. Potoff" jpot...@earthlink.net
This isn't a big deal. With current software, it is trivial to readdress letters to different schools. The big deal for letter writing is to make sure your recommenders have ample time to write the letters and they have enough information about you to write about something other than what a great student you are. I don't see what the point of applying to 8-10 schools is, though. Jeff
Arthur Sowers arthu...@magpage.com
Its not the software that is the issue. If a guy has to constantly ask a recommender to write letters (and there is likely to be several that need to be written), there is: i) the communication problem (maybe his recommender can only be reached by answering machine), ii) the delay/forgot problem (the writer says "I'll do it tommorrow" but tommorrow doesnt come) or the guy forgets, and iii) the "I remembered it wrong" (or, "yes I sent it" but in reality it never was), and several more problems.
The recommendee then has to contact the recipients to make sure the letter(s) have arrived and if not, then go back to the recomender and ask again.
And, if a secretary, or secretarial pool, is involved, then this brings in more opportunities for screwups.
In my life there have been a goodly number of letter requests that got sidetracked and not just on me, either.
I do not consider the recommendation letter issue as trivial at all. And, I saw Rich Lemert's post, too, who also missed these more important issues.
The big deal for letter writing Most schools do NOT accept everyone that applies. Many of the better schools are reporting that, for example, 3/4 of the applicants have straight A averages and they are taking 1/2 or less or even a lot less.
Thing on TV about this a few days ago. I think if I were he, I'd be applying to maybe 15-20. And, cut way accross the spectrum.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD -----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: | | http://www.magpage.com/~arthures | -----------------------------------------
chq ...@mtholyoke.edu (Glueball)
Sounds like you're appying to grad school. (If you aren't just ignore this.) I just went through the process and the standard thing to do is to give your recommender all 8-10 forms at the same time. Profs have told me that writing more than one rec is not an issue. They just need to write one recommendation and change the names or use Mail Merge in Microsoft Word before printing them out. Also, remember to give them stamped, addressed envelopes. Good luck.
Cheers, Charis.
clarosa clar...@biocomp.unl.edu
Sounds like it is too easy to get recomendation letters these days. If it was important it would not be so easy.
Something think about.
Josh Halpern vze23...@mail.verizon.net
It's easy to get letters of recommendation. It's hard to get walks on water letters of recommendation. Harder still is to get the recommender to call his friend at X and say take this student and make sure she works for you.
josh halpern
Rich Lemert llsm...@mindspring.com
If he needs to keep asking because he's added a school to his list, that's one thing. There could be any number of legitimate reasons why the place wasn't on his original list. No big deal - just dust off the file, update it, and send it off. I did it many times for my students (this includes recommendation letters for permanent jobs, too, not just grad school admissions).
If he needs to keep asking because his reference never gets around to writing the letter, that's an entirely different story. Probably means it's time to ask someone else to write a letter for you. Better someone with a lesser name that's actually willing to write than to never get a letter out of a "big name".
All of these are grounds for serious reconsideration of the people you've askedto be your references. It doesn't matter if they know you well and are a big name in the field, if they never get a letter off for you, they might as well not know you from Adam.
They were never much of an issue for me. The grad school requests for lettersgenerally came with a form - I just put the form someplace where it would stand out, and made sure that reference letters were one of my priorities.
If you consider the students a priority, none of these things has to become an issue. If you consider students a burden that get in the way of the "important" stuff you do - like your research - then they can be a problem.
I suspect Jeff's point is that the original poster may not have seriouslyconsidered what he wants to do and who he wants to work for. It's like the job hunting debate we continually get into - if you scattershot your application to a lot of places, you'll get a lot of rejections. Most of these will be from places you would expect to reject you if you had done any homework about it. If you target the places you apply to and find out what they want, you get a much higher acceptance rate.
Rich Lemert
"Jeffrey J. Potoff" jpot...@earthlink.net
As Rich said, if these are issues, then you have the wrong person writing letters for you. Find someone else.
If you can't speak to the person directly then, IMHO, it's ridiculous to ask them to write a recommendation letter for you. What are they going to write about? How you got a 92% in their cl***?
As faculty, I don't find letter writing a problem at all. I only write for students whom I have had some contact with besides them being in my cl*** (eg. we've talked before/after cl***, during office hours, etc).
I have them put together a packet of information for me that includes their current resume, personal information, the job or school they are applying to, what their career plans are, etc. I work directly with students, no middle men are involved. Given a week lead time, I can usually have a decent letter ready with a minimum of dramatics. I can even turn them around in a day, as I did for one exception student, if the student has all their ducks lined up.
What kind of graduate school are we talking about?
So they say. With the current state of the economy, if you are an American student in the top 10% of your cl***, (from a top 50 university) you will get accepted by nearly every school you to apply (in chemical engineering). The only thing that could work against you is if you state you want to due a certain type of research and they already have accepted a bunch of students who want to work in the same area. Students with grades between 3.0-3.5 will still get accepted at most, if not all, 2nd tier schools and some 1st tier schools.
Also keep in mind that the same crew of students sends out applications to the same schools. I sent out 4 applications for graduate school.
Obviously, I only accepted one offer. That may make it seem like you have more competition for graduate schools than your really do.
For med school, yes. For engineering graduate school, absolutely not.
Not a good idea for chemistry or physics grad school, either. Who has $1,000 laying around to blow on graduate school applications? I think the best method of picking graduate schools is to decide what kind of research you want to do, then find faculty who do that research and what schools they are at. Find schools strong in that research area. Apply to them. You will end up with 4-5 schools. If you end up with more, you aren't being very selective, at which point I would suggest you reevaluate what you're trying to do.
Jeff
Arthur Sowers arthu...@magpage.com
You may have not had a problem with this and may not have created problems for people who asked you, but I've run into many stories where someone was asked to do something and they didn't do it, didn't do it promptly, etc.
Just because YOU may be prompt, does not mean everyone else is.
And, the recipients of the letters do not always send out notices "your file is not complete, missing are following itemd as checked..." And, its another item that NEEDS TO BE DISCUSSED.
And, what makes you think this would be true for everyone else?
The grad school requests for Like I said, the "letters of recommendation" is not trivial.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ sure sounds like circular reasoning here and find out what Most of the stories I've heard about is that people who know they rank high will also get high acceptance rates. People farther down need to apply to more places to increase the chance of "winning" the lottery.
Anyone contemplating anything like school past the BS degree better do a lot of homework on all of these issues. I've known people who applied to 6-8 places and gotten rejected by all of them. Wastes a year of their life if that happens.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD -----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: | | http://www.magpage.com/~arthures | -----------------------------------------
Arthur Sowers arthu...@magpage.com
Neither you nor Rich brought up this issue. And, the original poster sounded like he thought everyone will write a nice letter, appropriately, and promptly.
In some offices, recommendation letters are a major effort and have been mechanized beyond "speaking to the person directly".
As a former faculty, I've heard (and been victim of) a number of screwups with letters of recommendation AND other very important memos that needed to be written, signed, countersigned, etc. It is not trivial.
I only write So, without contact, do you tell them "get lost" or what.?
And, this is for the ones you have contact with or not?
Or, in other words, they make an "application" to you for a recommendation letter?
I work directly with And, 10-20 years from now you're going to still do all this? Look around you and ask others about letters.
Actually on TV a few days ago they were talking about Stanford, Harvard, etc., graduate schools accepting 30-40% of the students with straight A averages. When I was at UI Urbana back in 1966, the Physical Chemistry Department graduate program stopped accepting grad students when they got down to GPAs of 3.98 on a scale of 4.0 = A. And, I did write that sentence correctly.
You are an exception.
I would not use the word "absolutely" in this piece of advice.
' Everyone has to ask what kind of money is needed for an application fee and make the tradeoff. I don't know what these fees are today. Back in my day, none of the state schools had application fees.
I think If I were the guy who originally posted, I'd be looking at my own credentials (GPA) AND contact schools he might be interested in and ask them what their admissions standards are and go from there. I've heard too many stories of guys who make those 4-5 applications, then get rejected at all of them.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD -----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: | | http://www.magpage.com/~arthures | -----------------------------------------
"Jeffrey J. Potoff" jpot...@earthlink.net
Right, you brought it up. It's a legitimate issue and I think my response was appropriate.
Well, the letter writing business I can control. Other office paper shuffling does leave you at the mercy of whoever is the limiting factor (eg. joint grant proposals, ABET acredidation, etc). Those things usually go right down to the wire with someone running to the FedEx box at 4:55pm.
No. You arange time to have a chat with them about what they're doing, who they are, future plans, etc. So far it hasn't been a problem as I try and get to know everyone in my cl***es. Even something minor like calling people by name in cl*** can really perk their interest in what you're talking about.
For everyone.
Basically they give me a copy of everything they've done to apply for their job/grad school. It is no extra work except they have to run the copy machine down the hall. The benefit to them is that I read all their application material carefully. If I see potential problems, or even typos, I can send them an email with suggestions for improvements.
This is what my professor asked of me when I was an undergraduate. I didn't find it to be much of a problem, and now as a professor, I think it works pretty well.
What they do is their business. I like to go the extra mile for my students. All my friends did the same thing. I later met people who said they only applied to one(!) graduate school.
Let me propose this. There have been arguments on s.r.c. that there is a glut of scientists, too many fishermen chasing too few fish after graduation. If you get rejected from 5 different schools, ***uming you applied to appropriate schools (eg not someone with a 3.0/4.0 average applying to MIT), wouldn't that suggest that going to grad school might not be the best career choice for you?
Jeff
Derek Oliver derek_REMOVE_THI...@ee.umanitoba.ca
Agreed with Jeff here.
I can think of a number of academics who have put on their www pages someting to the effect of "Many students ask me to write them a letter of recommendation. If you would like me to do so, I would greatly appreciate a copy of your cv, the job you are applying to and any other details you feel are pertinent. If you want me to write recommendations on more than one occasion then this information needs to be updated." A simple statement of fact - one can't write a letter out of thin air. Most people who state something like this are careful to comment that they will destroy the information after a certain period of time, or at the request of the person asking for the reference, as one should with the personal information of others.
The proliferation of letters of reccommendation is very much in the eye of the beholder. I've witnessed a face-to-face conversation along the lines of "So and so mentioned your name when he contacted us, would you like to comment on him" with the response "Oh yes - he's a good guy to have". An ex-graduate student of someone I know moves from one job to a better job in the process. Equally, I have seen people write "proper" letters of reccommendation for not terribly selective residential colleges.
The importance is very much in the eye of the requester -
and says most about them and the institution that requires it. It's like accommodation rental agencies requesting references, it's really only sorting those who can find someone to reccommend them from those who can't. I find it hard to believe that any of these people actually manage to sit down an make an objective decision based on the reference that could be correlated with the person's ability to meet their responsibilities (i.e. paying the rent and not destroying the place). To whit, they seem incapable of dealing with people from out of town - i.e. for whom the referee isn't just a local phone call away.
In these cases it's got nothing to do with reccommendation, it's about a bureaucratic process that has a veneer of accountability. It's also about insititutional abrogation of responsibility - similar to not funding the peer-review process and so on. Tangential thoughts over.
Derek
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dr. Derek R. Oliver <de...@ee.umanitoba.ca> Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Arthur Sowers arthu...@magpage.com
Yeah, but what YOU are doing is not available to the majority of students, especially those in earlier courses where there are hundreds of students.
And, sometimes the students just can't get any private time with the faculty. I've even heard where faculty literally "shove" students over to private tutors for "help".
You are rare.
That is rare.
I'm still going to wonder how you're going to do this 10-20 years from now.
Again, I've heard of almost none of this kind of interest in students.
I later met people who said they Yes, and I know two faculty who said they got funded every grant proposal they ever submitted. And, I would not recommend faculty stop writing proposals until they got well funded and even then would recommend that they still keep writing additional proposals with delayed start dates.
There are always late bloomers. There are always people out there who did poorer in early life and much better in later life. There are always people who have had extenuating circumstances.
There are always people who know how to take exams, but can't think. And, life sellects in their favor rather than people who know how to think but can't take, or have not learned how to take, exams.
Its actually gratifying that I've seen some medical school admissions from kids who did not have straight A averages and even some where the grades were between B and C and yet interviewed very well. And, I've seen kids apply to medical school with straight A averages (even from very good schools) and they just can't interview at all. Now, as far as I am concerned, from your last sentences of your last paragraph above, it seems like you are placing a lot more emphasis on the value of grades than quite a bit of the rest of the world. Quite a bit of real life will ask more about your job experience than your grades once you ...
Josh Halpern vze23...@mail.verizon.net
SNIP....
The worst example I ever saw, was one day I was walking down by the White House, and ran into a friend from Mississippi. What are you doing here I said. He replied: We flew up on the University plane with the signed original of our NSF proposal due in 1 hour.
Do you know where we can copy it?
Moral: Work in Washington, unless you propose to ARO.
josh halpern
Arthur Sowers arthu...@magpage.com
Thanks, but its not the worst story I've known about. When I was a postdoc at UNC (Chapel Hill), a memo came out from G&C that signed and reviewed grant proposal crunch time was getting frantic: The memo described how something like 200-300 copies of proposals were loaded into four large suitcases and hand carried by two reps onto planes that flew up to DC and taxied over to NIH for submission just before 5 pm deadline on the last day they would be accepted.
When I was at UMAB, I put ALL of my proposals together myself and drove them over, myself, to that place off River Road, and got them to stamp the receipt. Often I was a day or two before the deadline and I did not have to deal with the line of people that they said were always there on the last day.
The last department I was in at UMAB also had a delivery service so they would do all this "for" you...... and they charged $25/grant and charged it to your grant, too. They also charged all my telephone calls to my grants, too, and it worked out to more than $0.16 per minute! I was one of the few guys that looked up what was being charged to my account; I talked to another faculty who said all kinds of mysterious things showed up on her account and they removed those things when she squawked about it.
Then, a month or two later, other mysterious things showed up on her account, too. Cycle all over again.
Art
"R. Martin" russell.mar...@wdn.com
snipped to get to the point I want to address Let me tell you my story about this (granted this was back in the old days, BPC [Before Personal Computers]). I applied to 4 grad schools in physics, Princeton, Yale, Iowa State, and another small school in the northeast which I don't recall for sure. IMO my credentials were pretty good (double major, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, published research, President of Society of Physics Students chapter, etc.). I was accepted by only Iowa State. When I got there a prof asked me about how I ended up there.
When I told him the story he said, "Well Princeton, OK, but those other schools are not so hot. I have no idea why they didn't accept you." Later I applied to 5 grad schools in meteorology. I got in at all of them, but one was in Canada and couldn't give me support as a non Canadian. Another didn't like my answer on an essay question on their application and so questioned my "commitment" to the field and program (this after I'd finished a thesis Masters in physics, part of which was published in Phys Rev D, and had been working for 3+ years in atmospheric research), so they wouldn't support me for the first semester or year (I don't recall which) until I'd proven myself to them. [Pointed helical fastener] that, I thought. I chose to stay at Iowa State because there I already had a research project going (which ended up yielding several publications and being used in two dissertations, alas neither of them mine).
I have not won the Nobel Prize yet (I suspect politics ;-) ), so I suppose you can argue that those were not the best career choices for me, but based on my experience I really think that getting into graduate school is a non-determinsitic, partly irrational process.
Getting through graduate school is, too.
Regards, Russell
Arthur Sowers arthu...@magpage.com
Now I'll tell you MY story. I don't remember all the grad schools I applied to, but I do remember it was four. Two were Southern Illinois University (a fourth rate junk yard) and Ill. Inst. Tech. (third rate at best [in biology], and probably in most other things, too). I got rejected at three and accepted at one, SIU, and I took that one. However, I was interested in IIT and I called them up about the rejection (remember, this is for graduate school, and the day program, too [that can make a difference, too]) and asked for a meeting. So, I went down there and we talked about me, banging on their doors to get in, etc., etc., and, so, the guy says to me: "Well, lets do this... you apply again and send in all the stuff again" and in a tone of voice that tells me this time the decision will be different. And, so, in the back of my mind I said to myself: "Self, go to the other place" and I think I made a better decision in the long run.
From the contacts I've had with graduate sellection processes, I think there is the whole gamut. Those that go strictly on grades as primary determinant (etc., incl maybe letters & whatever else is along with the application) on down to such things as a possible match between an applicant and a prof. In fact, at the other grad school I went to (Texas A&M, a step up), in my cycle of applicants, the word got out that we were sellected not because of our grades (none of us were that good with undergrad grades or prior school grades) but because of matches with interests of certain faculty. And, from being on the interview committee at the UMAB school of medicine and seeing the applicant documents AND seeing who got admitted, there were a whole range of criteria and sometimes they took guys who had B/C grades! And, they were not legacy admissions, either.
But, I'll also come back to my general recommendation: go heavy on applications if you don't have a very very good idea of where YOU are and what THEY want AND you know you have a very good chance of being accepted.
I've just heard too many stories of guys make, say, four applications and end up with zip acceptances.
Art
"Jeffrey J. Potoff" jpot...@earthlink.net
Yet another reason for students to take my cl***. :) And how much weight do you think a letter from the professor of this cl*** is going to carry?
I can't help it if someone is in the wrong business.
Instead of typing I'll probably have a machine that converts speach to text.
After you finish a BS is pretty late.
Not really.
I haven't had one student out of about 300 over the last 5-6 years who demonstrated a good command of the material but did not score well on exams.
Wrong. For fresh graduates at the BS level, grades are everything because companies and graduate schools don't have much else to go by when selecting who to give interviews or admissions to. You do any student a grave disservice by suggesting otherwise. Grades are everything when it comes to getting your first job. They will get you in the door so you get the chance to show what a great person you are.
Without the grades, you get locked out of a lot of opportunities.
After you have been in the workforce a while, no one cares about your grades, just what you've done. But that is after your first job or after graduate school and we aren't talking about that.
No, but they all did when I was looking for interships or a co-op as an undergrad, when I considered a permanent job after graduating with my BS or when I applied to graduate school. At all the job fairs the exchange went like this: recruiter: "hello, I'm so and so how are you?" student: "I'm well and I'm interested in a job with your company." recruiter: "what's your GPA?" student:"2.5" recruiter:"sorry, I can talk to you about our company, but I won't give you an interview." If the student aswears 3.5 or higher, they have a shot at an interview. So what? We're talking about getting in to graduate school, remember?
No one cared about my grades when I applied for faculty positions, either, but they sure as hell cared when I applied to grad school.
Jeff
Arthur Sowers arthu...@magpage.com
Fine, if I hear about any who want to go into Chem E, I'll give them your email address. I know two good guys at UMAB, too, in pharmacology and AIDS/HIV.
Hey, what else can the student do? If female, offer to sleep (or other?) with the prof?
Jeeze, can't you have a little pitty/comp***ion once in a while?
complete with translation of senile accent into words, eh? ;-) My postdoc sponsor told me, for ten years he was a shifless bum. Then he went back to school. While I was a postdoc, he was a chair at UNC medical school (and terrorized the faculty). Also, from med school aps, I know there are a fair number who did a lot of wandering and put out mediocre grades...and then "got" inspiration. And, admissions.
I knew lots of guys who got better grades than I got, yet when I talked with them two weeks after the exam, they remembered less and could explain less than I did. I also taught a couple of times and had students that could explain things back to me better than I explained to them but they would always screw up one question so as to end up with a B, yet I knew lots of A students who just barely answered all the (essay) questions just barely correctly enough to get an A.
Grades don't count much after one gets into the real world.
Maybe you are doing multiple choice. And, how did you determine "good command" separately from the exams?
Lots of companies have very low imagination. The college graduate has no money (a quantitative factor) and companies like to measure everything, so, with no imagination, lots do hire on pure grades. No brilliance, just grades. I also know lots of situations where the grades really don't predict much.
You do any I knew lots of engineers when I was at UI Urbana. The guys who got higer grades went into fancy defense jobs. The guys who got lower grades went to work for Commonwealth Edison. I didn't know any of them that didn't get a job (except in recent times).
They will get you If and When, and ONLY if and when, grades are a competitive factor, then yes. I just know a fair number of situations (including some medical schools) where thats not so. Where one went for school often was more important. And, often letters of recomendation would over ride mediocre grades.
Don't forget, you have an engineering "mindset" and that "colors" your viewpoints.
Like I said, sometimes yes, sometimes no.
That's different.
when I considered a permanent job after graduating with my BS Recruiters the only way you considered getting a job? Usually the recruiters are HR people who don't know anything about anything else and don't understand anything besides GPA. Sometimes they are snotty because they are really not hiring or have tons of applications.
I've talked with computer whips where they never asked about grades, but experience & coursework....and they got jobs. Its not always like that, however.
Now lets me remind you to think back over a couple of posts now and have you tell me, please, if I ever gave any examples in real life where I knew (repeat: KNEW) that grades, in a number of cases, did not count very much in getting admitted. Or... can you remember? And, if, maybe, YOUR grades were so damned good, how did you do it if you can't remember things very well?
So they said to you "Well, Jeff, we're admitting you just because you had such excellent grades!", eh?
Art
Magesteff mages...@bellsouth.net
Arthur Sowers and Jeff Potoff wrote: Uh, Art....
Speaking as a Female, what I did one summer between semesters, while taking some additional cl***es, was to volunteer some time to work in a professor's lab. He was also my advisor at the time. He used it as kind of a teaching lab for me. I was not used as "grunt" labor (i.e. what some freshmen work study students are used for) to wash gl***ware. From that I learned how to do gel electrophoresis (too expensive at the time to waste on the "official" undergraduate student labs - all that got was paper chromatography lab and one small gel electrophoresis to look at in wide eyed wonder), sucrose gradient chromatography/separation, enzyme ***ays, and a few other skills. I do feel that these hours of "practice" did help me get my first laboratory position.
If I had my undergrad years to do over again I would do a few things differently
-the main one being - sticking with one lab over the course of my undergrad education (i.e. 4 years of part time experience) - Unfortunately I switched from the main University I was attending to go to a local Community College because I was having so much trouble getting into required cl***es (i.e. the basic Freshman english cl***es were full of Seniors due to the fact that there were fewer spaces in those cl***es than the demand), that I moved back to somewhere I could get them and transfer the credits to the University. Not a good move in the long run, I was in a great lab that first year and could have stuck with it the whole time and had a better track record by the time I was out looking for a full time position. I'm not whining, but I do wish that someone had been able to tell me these things way back when - I would have made a few different choices.
I found that depends a lot on the size of the University. When I went to one fairly large public one (over 35 K students) some of my basic Chemistry and Calculus cl***es had over 700 students in one cl***. If teachers can't teach K to 12 with more than 25 students in a cl***, how can someone hope to be able to help 700? The professors for these cl***es were inaccessible, they directed us to see the TA first. When I went to a smaller University (still public, still a research institution), with about a half of the student population (about 18 K), even in my largest cl***es (150 to 200) the Professors had plenty of time (relatively) to spend with students and are more accessible. Yet another thing I wish someone had told me from the beginning, I would have really done several things differently.
You mean there is something better than being a full time student?
<<he is just two good. He was maid for signs... >>>(LOL) But then they would make a great motivational speaker. Have you seen the price of some of these things? Even accounting for hall rental and over head, they must make out like bandits.
I'd submit that GPA is also not going to tell you who will be the more dedicated researcher - it could be that they have learned how to study, and have lots of potential, but it could also be true that they had a phenomenal recall, breezed through cl***es, and have no potential at all for the actual work. College was very different compared to High School (for me), full time work is very different compared to a full time position.
Rephrase, there are a lot of people who know how to take exams, but are lousy when it comes to practical long term application of principles.
Then why is it such a bit part of Grad School entrance requirements? Why do some Grad Universities require a high GPA (MIT, et. al.)? Why not make practical work experience as important?
(Hey, I can question from both sides of the cl***, can't I? ;-p) Well that shoots Darwin all to bits. Being able to regurgitate information without digesting it is a lot like bulimia. You can binge all you want, but the purging will have a detrimental effect. They may be great applicants but are they going to be out at the doctor's every day on workmen's comp?
Beg to differ. My brother is very intelligent, however, he has borderline learning disabilities with reading and writing which have always made it difficult for him to excel in the 'normal' cl***room environment. He needed more time than allotted to take elementary and High school exams, and due to that, had borderline near failing grades for many years to the point that he hates/fears tests. When he when to Vocational school (emphasis on Hands on learning and practical exams) for Auto mechanics he went from a D+ student to a B+ student. The biggest stumbling block he had to get over was taking the first few ASC certification tests, which are sit down read the question, make an answer in a set amount of time. Luckily for him these tests are four hour tests and you can sign up for as many tests as you want to take in that time frame. Some people may do two or three, he usually does one. Now he has five certifications, and two months ago he was named top tech at the dealership he works at based on customer satisfaction surveys and fewer "come backs" (i.e. come back because they didn't get fixed right the first time). My brother is damn good at what he does, but his self-confidence had a lot to recover from.
Post BS, my student work experience was more valuable and got me a better job than my contemporaries (i.e. I didn't start out flipping burgers after I got my BS - I know some who did, until they got a better gig). And if we are really talking about "first time jobs" the first job I had was during High School, as a cashier in the pharmacy of a local Drug Store. Grades didn't get me that job, either.
I wonder if the guys from Edison are seen as more hirable due to broader skill base than the ones from defense who were responsible for a limited area?
Very few positions I have applied for required that I also submit a transcript from college. What got me in the door was my broad skill base - may not have gotten me the job, but did open the door. That includes my first job after graduation with a BS.
Is it just an engineering mindset, or could it be called a "campus" mindset? i.e.
are Colleges and Universities so tied to the GPA that they can't see anything else as valuable?
This is also S.R.C. - when have you ever seen anything here not have at least one side tangent? (I'm just waiting for one to degenerate into H1B discussion).
And -
Isn't part of the point -'is graduate school worth attending?' and 'how many letters of reference for grad school are too many?' and 'is there anyone, other than school professors, I may ask to provide a letter of reference that would look good to the school(s) to which I am applying ?'
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Magesteff - "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."-Albert Einstein
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Josh Halpern vze23...@mail.verizon.net
SNIp....
Maybe he listened. An important skill in instructors as well as students.
josh halpern
"Jeffrey J. Potoff" jpot...@earthlink.net
My point was if that if someone checks on your references, they're going to find out you were student 103 of 354. The next obvious question from the interviewer to the referrer is, "just how well did you know this person?" I know if I received a recommendation letter from a professor teaching a 300 student low-level course I would be somewhat skeptical as to how relevant it was unless there was something in the letter to indicate that the professor and student had some other kind of contact besides "I lecture, you take cl***." Comp***ion I'm good at. I do that a lot with students, even the ones who are failing my course because they have missed the last 6 weeks of cl***. Pity isn't my style. But really, if a professor is pawning their students off on private tutors then it seems to me their heart is in the wrong place.
Unfortunately, there's not much I can do about what professor X does at a university 500 miles away from me.
I stand corrected. I had one student like that a few years ago. Every exam she would pull some rabbit out of the hat and score well. I suspect(ed) that her dumb act was just an act. This semester I had one student who had a habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, although I could tell from all her work that her grasp of the material was very good. For all her bonehead mistakes she still managed to squeak an A out of my course.
But it's that path of first getting to the "real world" where they really do matter.
HA! My exams are all problem solving. Bring your calculator, ruler, text book, pencil and a big eraser. No regurgitation of facts at all.
I write the exam problems very carefully so that I can use them to sort who knows what key concepts. For example, I simple problem I asked on the final exam I wrote was to determine the steam flow rate required to generate 1 KW of electricity from a steam turbine. The students were given the inlet and outlet conditions (temperature and pressure) of the steam. The solution is simple. Look up the specific enthalpies on the steam table, do the energy balance and get the m*** flow rate of steam.
From this simple problem I can tell a number of things. 1. Do they know how to read a steam table?
2. Do they know how to perform the energy balance?
3. Are their calculations accurate?
1 and 2 are key, 3 is more of a technicality.
I will combine multiple "simple" problems into a larger problem to see how well they have ***imilated data (can they apply the basic concepts to "new" problems).
Sometimes I just like to play dangerous. I say dangerous because if everyone was paying attention in cl*** then they would all get 100% on the problem, making it a useless diagnostic tool for me. When I do this, I essentially dare students not to learn material. I may go over a problem many times in cl***, ***ign it for homework, talk about it again, do another very similar example and suggest strongly it's going to be on the exam. Then I put that exact problem on the exam, but with different numbers. What's somewhat shocking is even though I've gone over that material to the nth degree, there are still people who don't have any idea what to do when they see it again on the exam.
I have multiple methods of ***essment. I speak with students directly and I can tell from their questions at approximately what level of understanding they have. The beginning of every cl***, actually, I treat as Q and A as long as they like. I like to avoid lecturing and prefer a more back and forth interaction between myself and the cl***.
That way they stay awake and I enjoy what I'm doing. I can't think of a less effective teaching method than lecturing for 2 hours straight. I might even stop in the middle of cl*** to talk about the latest movie everyone went to see just to keep everyone's brain fresh. For each exam, I also ***ign an additional take home problem that they get to work on for 2 days using any resources, except other people such as friends or faculty. I also grade their homework myself (that I may not do so much in the future with larger cl***es, but for < 30 it's not bad). This semester the correlation between final grade and homework grade was very strong. Those earned a C or less scored less than 40% on the homework. Those who earned A's and B's scored around 80% on homework. Had I noticed a discrepancy between homework and exam scores for and individual I would have taken steps to figure out what was going wrong. But I haven't had any students that do really well on homework, then bomb the exams. I do have students that might tank one exam out of three (and I expect it to happen), but it's possible to do that and still get and A.
Imaginative or not, this is the way things are, this is the game and you have to learn how to play it.
In engineering I have found they are a fairly good predictor of a number of things. You will get a student with a B average who suprises you once in a while with the depth of their knowledge, but not a C student.
I don't see how. If a student of mine was getting a C in my cl***, how could I possibly write a good recommendation letter for them? On the other hand, I've spoken with professors on the acceptance committees.
One of the biggest joke is recommendation letters. Every student is the "greatest ever." To further underscore the limited importance of recommendations letters I spoke with someone on the faculty hiring committee of a highly ranked chemistry department. They told me one of the letters they got for a candidate they eventually hired said basically, "I don't know this person all that well so I can't say much about them." Recommendation letters have some importance, but what level of importance I think is quite debatable.
I do, but I've also spent time in chemistry and chemical-physics departments so I'm not completely ignorant of how things work in the sciences.
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Arthur Sowers arthu...@magpage.com
Well, I don't think you have to be a female to do this. I did stuff like this way way back, too. Buuuuuut, its a good thing AND you can get letters of recommendation from people like this.
He used it as kind of a teaching lab for me. I was not Same thing happened with me. When I was younger, I got into all kinds of stuff and it really helped later on.
I think its always a good idea to have more different "experiences" for shorter periods than fewer, or only one, "experience" for longer. Its better for your resume/CV in many ways.
For those who really want a real, traditional, liberal (not political liberal, either), cl***ical college education, I'd push people into the so-called small "elite" schools where they only do teaching and the profs make the students think and interact on one to one.
You mean that spending all day, 5 days a week, in a large public library is worse than rote memorization, psyching out the prof, cramming for exams, chasing around for copies of old exams, etc.,etc., is worse than being a full time student? ;-) Or....made ... for sighns! ;-) You're not wrong.
rah, rah for Magesteff.
Didn't Einstein (or was it Mark Twain?) that said don't let schooling get in the way of your education. And, Peter Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd" When I was an undergraduate, I didn't get good grades. I was in the library all the time reading journals. I didn't know how to take exams.
When I got into grad school, I got "smart" and figured, I've got to figure out how to take exams. Once I focused on that "angle" my grades shot up.
Less happy, but much better grades.
Because its part of elitism and all the underlings can brag "Oh.. _I_ got a 3.9 or 4.0 and _I_ got into Princeton, Yale, Harvard [excuse me...pronouce that: Hahvahd], Stanford, etc." Say all that with highly haughty tone of voice, too. Good for swelled heads.
There are many kinds of survival in human race: as my brother once said "Being [i.e. emulating] Jesus Christ only requires that when you walk on water, its because you know where the stones are just below the surface." Being able to regurgitate information without You said a mouthful there. Actually, several mouthsful.
They may be great applicants but are they going to be out Or, "Keep on truckin'" There are all kinds of stories of "exceptions" and I think there are more exceptions than most will admit.
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