Help with LOR!!

[shindog]

---

Members don't see this ad.

I just wanted to know how other students are dealing with the following situation:

Just as an example, you schedule neurology, EM, and anesthesia rotations at some fairly big-name programs just to get the feel for each specialty and for the programs in general. You're still not sure which specialty you want to pursue. So you do well on all three rotations and decide to ask for letters at the end of each rotation.

Now- do you tell the letter writers to write a generic letter that excludes mentioning a particular specialty? Or will they automatically write the letter as if you're going into neuro, EM, etc.? Or, let's say you made up your mind before the neuro rotation that you like EM, can you ask the neuro attending to write your letter with an EM slant?

The reason I ask is what if you decide later on that you want to go into EM. So you may have several outstanding letters already written that talk about your neuro or anesthesia skills. But you don't want to "waste" these letters because they are positive and written by "famous" faculty at big-name programs.

It seems pointless to waste good letters from well-known writers, but at the same time, does an EM program director really want to hear about how great of an anesthesiologist you'll be?

Another problem arises if you ask the anesthesia or neuro attending to slant his/her letter towards EM because that's what you really want to do. I know how attendings can get angry when students aren't totally interested in pursuing their specialty. They feel you've wasted their time and may not write a good letter for you.

Anyway, I wish my advisors had a clue about this. Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

[ckent]

If the attending really likes you , they won't care that you aren't going into their chosen specialty as attendings are used to writing letters for students going into different specialites. I take it that you are a third year and haven't decided your chosen specialty yet. If that is the case, you can always ask potential letter writers if they would be willing to write a draft of your LOR and keep it on their computer, so that they won't forget who you are when it comes time for you to apply. If they ask you what specialty that you are applying for, you can always just say that you haven't decided yet but you were wondering if they could just put the basics in your letter. Then you can provide them with all of the needed info (evals, personal statement, cv) during the end of third year. Also, if you are applying for more then one specialty, you will need different letters for each specialty. Some letter writers will be willing to write you different letters for each specialty (the nice ones), some might just write a generic letter saying what a good resident you'd make. I personally think that it's nicer to have a letter that mentions your specialty and how good you'd be in it (don't want a LOR going out to internal medicine saying how fast you are at triaging patients in the ER for instance). Your letter should definitely not say that you are going into a different specialty then the specialty that you are sending the letter too, that would be a faux pas.