I am so lost about writing this letter of recom.-please help, anyone

[yalla22]

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I was asked by one of my profs to write my own letter of recommendation. Aside from the shaky ethics, I'm at a total loss about how to do this. I feel very strange writing about myself and most importantly hve never really seen a recommendation letter to even know what they look like. I read accepted.com and essayedge.com but none of them provide full lengths.
Like how do the letters normally start? Who do they address? How do they flow??

Please help!🙁

 

[yrodri15]

To whom it may concern,

It is my pleasure to recommend _________ for admission into your program... He is great... impeccable sense of morals... leader... Well-kempt... great taste in clothes ... saved an injured dog with a ziploc bag and dental floss...

.....
......
......

 

[tomorrowgirl99]

Umm.. I guess the easiest thing to do would be to go back to the professor and ask him or her how they start their letters. Just discuss your strengths and mention some faults.

 

[hardy]

You HAVE to start out the letter by mentioning how long and in what capacity you have known the applicant (in this case yourself). Then you should mention how close you (or the professor) have worked with the applicant. After that you can start throwing around superlatives. But you should include example to make it more vivid.

 

[Jaider]

My advice? Find someone else to write your letter! Or at least keep this in mind:

quoted from www. accepted.com:

9/30/2005

Letter of Recommendation: You-Write-It-I'll-Sign-It Dilemma
Your boss, mentor, and good friend has agreed to write letters of recommendation to three business schools on your behalf. You shrewdly have prepared a package of information for her: your resume, a summary of each program's values, excellent quotes from reviews, the questions she will respond to for each school, and the deadlines for the letters. When you give her the information six weeks before the letter is due, she gives the packet a funny look, swallows hard, and acknowledges receipt.

Three weeks later, you email your boss to ask her if she has made any progress on the letters. “I’ve thought about them,” she emails back.

Another week goes by, and you call her, “How’s it going?”

“Look,” she says, “I really want to help you, but I am swamped. You write them, and I’ll sign them. You know what should be in them, and I simply don’t have the time to work on them now. I still really want to help you, but I didn’t realize that the letters would be so demanding or that I would have this new project dumped on me.”

Now what?

This topic came up at the Tuck Conference for Educational Consultants that I attended in June at Dartmouth. The Tuck admissions committee strongly condemned, as do most schools, the widespread practice of applicants writing letters for supervisors’ signatures. They condemned it on an ethical level, which I disagree with, and also on a substantive level, where I must admit they have a point.

The letters are supposed to confirm data found in your application and provide a fresh perspective on your application. If you write the letter, your letter does a poor job of the former and fails entirely at the latter.

At the Tuck Conference, one of the consultants, Luvy Gonzalez, said that when her client is confronted with this situation, she tells her client to invite the recommender out to lunch, take the recommendation questions along, and interview the recommender by asking him or her the questions found in the form. The applicant jots down the recommender's answers, drafts the letter containing the recommender's answers, and gives it to the recommender for signature.

The resulting letter really is the recommender’s, and yet he or she doesn’t have to take the time to write it. It contains that other perspective that the adcom values so highly and is authentic. If you make good use of the interview notes, the recommendation will also have the recommender's voice.

The Tuck adcom members present when this suggestion was made didn’t comment, but they also didn’t object.

Posted by Linda Abraham on Fri, 30 Sep 2005 03:10:38 -0800 | Permalink | Post a comment


That website also has a link for tips for letter writers, so if you do end up writing your own recommendation, those might be useful. check it out. 🙂

 

[Comrade]

I was asked by one of my profs to write my own letter of recommendation. Aside from the shaky ethics, I'm at a total loss about how to do this. I feel very strange writing about myself and most importantly hve never really seen a recommendation letter to even know what they look like. I read accepted.com and essayedge.com but none of them provide full lengths.
Like how do the letters normally start? Who do they address? How do they flow??

Please help!🙁

I had the same dilemma not too long ago. When I looked into it, I was told that it wasn't so much an ethics problem to submit a list of your 'favorable traits' or even a rec letter draft to your recommender, as long as they don't just pass it off as you wrote it with their signature. However, I wouldn't think any recommender who's written recs for med schools would do that anyway. If they're eager to help you realize your dreams, I've found they'll put in the thought/time to write a helpful letter; especially if they have something to start them off with. So what I did for one or two of my recommenders, was given them the "personal characteristcs' list from chapter 7 of the MSAR (med schools admissions requirements) book. It rattles off a list with items like pyschological maturity, integrity, compassion, communication, etc. For some of them, I'd list something that I did that might demonstrate that trait such as volunteering or giving a presentation or whatever. Then it wouldn't take them more than a week or two to finish and send off the final version of the letter, which since I never saw lets me claim to waive my rights to see it and keeps med schools happy that I don't have a clue what people who know me well might say about me 🙂

 

[drmota]

my 2 cents: do not be modest at all, you have to talk yourself up a lot. talk about how they know you want to be a doctor and why they think you would be a good one. also, you can use it to address any shortcomings in your application. the adcomm will take excuses from a professor much more seriously than ones that you give them. good luck.
-mota