Has anyone ever been told to write their own recommendation letter before? I asked a former professor to write me one, and he told me to write it myself and he would sign it. He's a great teacher and he says he wants to help me, but he wants me to do it myself. I have no idea where to begin! I'm hardly objective with myself.
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Writing your own recs isn't a great idea. It can be pretty obvious to an admissions committee and it can get you rejected. Can you offer to put together all of the pertinent details you'd like your professor to include in your recommendation. He should be able to put your ideas together into a recommendation.
This seems like the way to go. All of the other advice point to nothing but an ethical morass. Find people who respect you enough to actually put some effort in for you.
I meant to quote this guy...
From what I hear that's pretty common, especially if its some one who's time is valuable (like a really big BSD). Good thing is you get phrase everything in a positive light.
Just change everything to the third person and use the thesaurus a lot so it doesn't sound like you wrote it.
Have a bright person that you know well write it for you (seriously). Adcoms see so many of these that they can often see your writing style in the recs.
There are article writing services online that will write whatever you want, and you can then edit the text in order to change it just enough. Alternatively, you can write a recommendation yourself and ask someone to rewrite it so that the style is not yours. The adcoms don't care that much whether you write your recos as they know that most people do, but they do care whether the recommendations SOUND as if you wrote them yourself, which shows lack of judgment.
Be very afraid of writing your own recommendation. Admissions committee members DO care very much if you write your own recommendation. As @ReluctantMBA says, it can get you rejected. They are also aware that it is prevalent, so they look out for it.
Yes, you should put a package together with salient points and offer to help the recommender by offering to review the draft if they are comfortable with that.
Also, business schools (if that's what we are talking about here) prefer work supervisors, not academics. They in fact discourage academics recommendations pretty openly.
Here's the issue. I haven't written my own recommendations. But I have provided some very detailed bullet points for each of the prompts to my recommenders. I can't control the degree to which they copy/rephrase my words beyond a cautionary note in the email, and I also can't inspect the letter of recommendation to say that it looks 'too much' like my voice. This seems like quite the dilemma really. Either provide no guidance to your recommenders and risk an ineffectual recommendation, or take the risk that they quote your bullet points directly and wind up sounding like you. I would hope that I am accorded the presumption of innocence.
However, there's nothing much I can do about it now. I really doubt though that Principals and partners at Blackstone/KKR sit down to write recommendations ab initio.
If you do end up writing your own rec, make sure you have trusted friends/family members revise it in their own words, so it doesn't end up sounding like you. Or else, as betsy said, it could end up getting you dinged.
If you really want to be anal about it, there's probably a Machine Learning classifier that you can build. (just to nerd out here for a minute). Everyone has certain expressive tics in his/her writing style. But, that comes down to tone too. Your essays will be, ideally, emotive in tone but your recs will be professional and business sounding. I HIGHLY doubt that an MD at Goldman is going to sit down and write the 1000 words for HBS/ 1000 words for GSB/ 2500 words for Wharton that these schools ask for without significantly lifting from the bullet points his/her protege has provided.
Anyway, let's not clog up this discussion and let's wait for Betsy to chime in.
Oh GS, you flatter me. OK. Here's the deal. Some of those big companies are so used to sending people to business school that they have their own templates. So when you ask if a manager at KKR will write a recommendation from scratch, the answer is.... possibly. Look, someone probably wrote recommendations for that VP or MD at some point, and everyone knows that it's part of the deal.
If the associate puts together a good package (list of accomplishments, bullet points for the letter, goals, reasons for support,etc.), and the manager wants to help, it's part of his or her job to write something decent. Your job is to manage that process. And that's a big deal, and business schools know that it's not exactly a cakewalk to get someone to take time out of his or her day to help you leave the firm.
Now I know for a fact that most of you reading this thread have already submitted applications, so I am not going to humor you any more. It's in. It's done. Get some rest. Watch baseball. Play golf. Drink heavily until the deadline. It's up to the universe now.
'Night.
I'll write it for you OP.
Bad idea. I wrote a rec for myself when I was first applying for grad school 2 application cycles ago and I'm pretty confident that was the reason I got dinged first time round.
I would suggest either taking the advice of collating a bunch of points and sending it to the professor or alternatively biting the bullet and finding someone else to write it. If thats not an option, get someone else to write it for you (a friend, relative, etc) and provide them with the same stuff you were going to give the professor. Especially after reading all these thoughts, when you get down to write it yourself, it will play on your mind.
HAHAHAHHAHAHA..... This thread is really hilarious for me. I'm worried that the bullet points I gave were so detailed that my boss might borrow heavily from them. Had I not provided any, I'd wonder whether the recs showcased enough good qualities to get me through in the first place. Just goes to show, wherever you go, there's no hiding from your own neuroticism.
I think I'm going to take Betsy's advice and drink scotch and play golf (although not in that order)
Done it a few times & was successful every time. Probably the recs were edited by the referee lol.
Stop obsessing about it, people in the adcoms are probably not stupid and understand that this happens a lot with busy profs / managers. It has a signature of that person and his contact address, if they have doubts, they could call the person themselves.
Ask a different professor for letter of recommendation! The fact that this prof asks you to write a letter yourself means that he/she doesn't really know or care about you much at all. You want a letter of recommendation from someone who knows you, appreciates your works and would genuinely want to vouch for you, not someone who sees this as a chore but is too polite/indifferent to turn you down.
Nope. But I often heard that others were. And it makes sense:
Your profit from letter of recommendation: 100% Profit of the guy you ask: 0%
Your work to draft the letter: 0% Work of the guy you ask: 100%
It's quite an uneven distribution.
Who says that an applicant puts 0% work into drafting a recommendation letter? I didn't expect my recommenders to come up with all of the content for my recs and I don't think the OP does either. It's a team endeavor. The recommendee should be providing content, but it's up to the recommender to massage the message and add a bit of color commentary. I know that I spent a significant amount of time writing up guides for each of my recs and talking my recommenders through the process. It's one thing to make the recommender's job as easy as possible, but I think it's to an applicant's detriment to do all of the work for them.
Here's a tip that will change your life: When replying in an email you put your new text before the message you are replying to. When replying to a blog post it's the opposite. So your new text should go below the old text. If you don't do this people will still be nice but everybody will secretly agree that you were probably introduced to that whole interweb thing just like 2 weeks ago.
Gentleman and err madam, please.
Sooner or later in your life, you may need to compose a recommendation letter. Composing a letter of recommendation for someone else is a substantial duty and ought to be considered important. Before you consent to the undertaking, ensure you have an unmistakable comprehension of what the letter will be utilized for and will's identity understanding it. You ought to likewise ensure that you comprehend what sort of data is being normal from you. For instance, somebody may require a letter featuring their authority encounter, yet in the event that you don't know anything about that individual's initiative ability or potential, you will experience serious difficulties thinking of a remark.
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