Brag Sheet?

[GellaBella]

So a professor at my University offered, out of the blue, to write me a letter of recommendation for vet school, which is awesome because I was trying to decide who my 3rd LOR person would be.

She asked me to write up a 'brag sheet' of things I'd like her to write about. My question is, what kinds of things would you guys out in there and how would you format it?

Right now I have it in a list format, of just bulleted short blurbs, but I'm not sure if I should go in more detail?

Things I've included are:

A brief summary of my undergraduate research
A brief summary of my PhD research
The fact that I've mentored 3 masters students/projects
Taught medical students microbiology
Community Service/Activities that I've been involved in at graduate school

I guess I'm unsure of the depth and details I should go into. I don't want to give her like a 5 page document. How long should this be? and should I stick with just kind of one sentence bulleted points?

Should I include things unrelated to school ? Like I run half marathons, take ballet etc? or anything like that?

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[ColoGirl]

When I talked to one of my mentors about going to vet school he did the exact same thing! He asked me to write some things up for him "so he could really brag on me". I updated my CV that I had for stuff with my PhD and added most of the things that I had put on my application, including hours for each experience. I made sure to list my honors and awards, publications, and professional meetings also. He was really appreciative of it, so I actually decided to give a copy to each person writing on my behalf. I got great feedback on it.

As an aside, Cornell has a PDF with extra questions they would like addressed in the LOR. I also gave a copy of that to each of my evaluators.

 

[VAgirl]

Whenever I've asked people for letters of recommendation, I've always given them packets of information. I guess I never even thought about the fact that I might have been giving them too much info. I figured that they could use or not use what I gave them, but would rather they had it for reference.

I would always include an introductory letter/cover letter that gave them the basic info on what I was applying for, due date, for vet school I gave them the VMCAS eLOR info and help email address, my own contact information, and basically a table of contents of the other documents that I was providing them with. I think I would also sometimes explain kind of what I thought was important about our interactions for the context of the recommendation. Since that's a confusing statement, here's an example: to my horse back riding instructor who wrote me a 4th supplemental vet school LOR, I said something about how I appreciated her taking the time to write a LOR for me, since none of my other LORs had seen me work directly with animals therefore she was in a unique postion to comment about that. Something to that effect, so I was setting up for her kind of the direction I hoped her letter would take.

What I else I included in the packet varied by person to some extent, but I always included an updated copy of my resume, copies of transcripts (if I thought they made a positive statement). For a former employer, I included a list of projects I'd worked on for him, awards received while working under him, etc. For a professor, I included a paper I'd written while in his course on a topic that was related to my area of interest in vet med.

For scholarship applications since entering vet school, I've also given the people writing my LORs copies of my vet school application essays since I thought they were relevant to the scholarship I was applying for.

I guess my thought was that LORs are always better the more specific people can be, and if they had more info at their finger tips, chances were greater they could be more specific. Also key to this I think is giving the person a way to sort through the information (in the form of a table of contents at the beginning of the packet, in the cover letter). This allowed me, I feel, to give them as much info as I wanted, they would know what they had, and they could use whatever they thought might help.

 

[nyanko]

Just for the record, I personally would aspire to be even 1/4 as organized and prepared as VAgirl is for everything, but I don't think even that mark is feasible for me.

 

[VAgirl]

Just for the record, I personally would aspire to be even 1/4 as organized and prepared as VAgirl is for everything, but I don't think even that mark is feasible for me.

😳 I've been accused of being a tad OCD before. My husband even sings "Oooo-Ceeee-Deeee" to me to the tune of the NBC jingle sometimes. Heh.

What can I say, I like organization. 😀

 

[rileyroo]

the organization of cat toys. VAgirl, that's awesome!

 

[twelvetigers]

Ahh, there's an lolcat for every situation. 🙂