Fulbright Educational Advising Center/FEAC Tips: Letters of Recommendation Recommendations are very important to a successful application in the USA. Therefore you need to make sure you pick the rick referees to write your recommendations and that they know how to put your accomplishments in the best light. http://www.hhmi.org/sites/default/files/Educational%20Materials/Lab%20Management/l etter.pdf, a 17-page material offered by a top U.S. entity based in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, provides excellent advice on recommendations for graduate study, but the same principles hold good for undergraduate applicants as well. Of particular relevance are pages 9 and 10 with solid advice for asking someone to write a letter for you. Graduate applicants will love pages 13-17 that include two letters of recommendation and plentiful insights. Pages 1 to 9 survey the main points any person writing a powerful recommendation letter needs to be aware of. A range of examples illustrate the points and make Writing a Letter of Recommendation. Electronic Addendum to Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty, second edition, issued by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Burroughs Wellcome Fund in 2009, a most valuable tool for anybody who wants a good letter of recommendation or plans to write one. If you are a high school student interested in admission to selective undergraduate programs in the USA and you are better off with insights shared in video format, you may like to watch http://admissions.vanderbilt.edu/apply/recommendation-letters.php You’ll spend 12 minutes with a representative of prestigious Vanderbilt University and enjoy a thorough Guide to Letters of Recommendation including comprehensive tips for counselors and teachers. If you only have 5 minutes and still want to get the key information on how best to write a powerful recommendation letter, then the brief text by MIT is for you. In addition to the valuable advice, MIT offers sample paragraphs and the relevant critique, showing referees how to turn the recommendation letter into a powerful and persuasive component of the application package. http://mitadmissions.org/apply/prepare/writingrecs. And now a few real life quotes from recommendation letters that Romanian students have submitted to U.S. universities. They are not intended in any way as normative, but as telling samples of the many ways in which effective recommendation letters can be approached. 1
Opening paragraph 1. Claudia is a most remarkable student. Please accept this enthusiastic recommendation for her application for an internship. I have known Claudia for four years as a student, as an advisee, and as my research assistant. I first met her as a firstyear student in a freshman seminar that I taught titled: Holocaust: Trauma in Art, Literature, and Film. She performed at the top of her class. She was so extremely bright, well spoken and articulate that she stood out among all the other students. She also writes well. She demonstrated insight into difficult material far beyond her years, and was also enthusiastic and self-motivated. 2. As Physics teacher over the past 16 years, I have been teaching Andrei for the past 3 years. With two Physics classes per week I have had ample opportunities to watch him grow and develop in a group of very competitive students, as is the case with our high school which enrolls the best students in our city. 3. I have worked with Laurentiu for a relatively short time, for only one year since he came to me to improve his English, but he has grown on me and I have accepted to write a recommendation for him as I am convinced that any university that will admit Laurentiu will soon realize they have done a favor to their campus. 4. The Fulbright Educational Advising Center (FEAC) is one of the 470+ global U.S. Department of State-affiliated EducationUSA advising centers and part of the Romanian-U.S. Fulbright Commission. Rares joined the EducationUSA advising center at the Fulbright Commission in Romania for an undergraduate internship which started in Sep. 2011, during his junior year at “George Cosbuc” National English High School, a very competitive secondary school in this country. However, his relationship with our Center started before that, when we met at the Flag Day event organized at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence where Rares and his colleagues developed posters on a number of U.S. states and won a number of prizes for their thorough research and soaring inspiration. 5. I am very pleased to offer my highest and unqualified support for Ligia Popescu. Ligia was a student in my “Social Life in American Culture” course which I taught as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Bucharest in fall 2012. Middle paragraph/s 1. Laurentiu attends a very academically challenging high school focused on sciences but, in order to pursue his education abroad, he needed to pass an international exam in English, so he came to me for tutoring. If ever I saw determination in a student, that student is definitely Laurentiu. He has managed to achieve spectacular progress in English in less than a year, which shows he is highly motivated and capable of hard work and of pursuing a long-term goal. Very logical and scientifically-minded, Laurentiu always tackles the task at hand from all angles and never gives up until he has managed
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to solve it to his satisfaction. Academically, Laurentiu ranks among the top 5% of the students I have coached in a 23-year career and his fine results are due both to his intellectual capabilities and his excellent working habits. 2. A keen observer of the problems that society faces nowadays, Cristi likes being involved in all sorts of activities, doing his best to contribute to improving the world around him. Last year he felt he could do more for his peers, thus enrolling as a volunteer in a national campaign against drugs (“My NO Drugs Message” Competition), organized by The Drug Prevention, Evaluation and Counseling Centre. He made a short film where he emphasized the negative effects that drugs have on teenagers who choose drugs as a way to escape either constraints or problems in their life. The film was awarded the 1st prize at regional level and at the moment is running for a national competition. 3. Between 2009 and 2012, when Andreea was a student at our high school, I had plenty of time to know her very well and notice the improvements in her academic and personal life. Although she was a bit shy at the beginning, she gradually became ambitious and very confident in her own strength and abilities. Whatever work she does, she tries to do it thoroughly and with dedication. I am sure that in the future she will try to change something for the better at your college and will influence the people around her in a positive way. 4. This is one of the things I personally love about Paula: how Paula the dreamer, Paula the top student, Paula the volunteer teacher, Paula the programming whiz kid, Paula the FEAC intern and, now, Paula the mentor for one of our newest successful internship applicants, join hands in a magic dance, and how they twirl and twirl and twirl until you can’t really make them up separately although you can tell they’re all there, and how this graceful Paula-ful hurricane travels from the top of her angelic-looking head to the tips of her fingers moving at top speed on her trusty computer keyboard. 5. If there is one thing that characterizes Lucia very well, that is versatility. I remember that she once told me that her motto in life is “To succeed in anything, you must posses a solid foundation in each field of knowledge”. Her transcript and her resume clearly demonstrate her strong motivation to be the best in everything she does. Not only her academic performance is exceptional, but also her extracurricular involvement. 6. It is indeed a pleasure for me to write this letter for Mihai whom I have known for seven years. He is one of the most brilliant, engaging and gifted students that I have encountered during my 15-year career as a teacher at this high school. From the beginning of the 5th grade he made a very good impression on me, and I soon became astonished by his thirst for information and his determination in the quest for excellence. I have closely followed his development not only as a student, but also as a person. His academic performance and his extracurricular activities have proved me right in predicting he would become a bright scholar and a compassionate individual with quite a charismatic personality.
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7. What is very special about Roberta – and we deal with thousands of students every year – is that, unlike most high schoolers her age, she is self-directed to an extent quite unusual in one so young. As such, she can thrive on limited guidance and is able to take the lead on projects thanks to her own research and initiative. In our busy office interns are often called to act upon minimal guidance, with plenty of room for initiative. Some hate it and ask for more structure in order to succeed, others just love it and find it hugely stimulating and productive – and the latter is the group Roberta proved to firmly be in. To a busy office such as ours, Roberta’s approach was a perfect fit! 8. In a culture that often values loud speaking and aggressive approximations, Alex reminds you of the Quiet revolution: he comes across as an enriching introvert, precisely the type advocated by Susan Cain in her TED conference http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html. Only that he can easily rise to the circumstances and play “pretend extrovert” with amazing success and effectiveness. 9. Subtle and savvy, and for ever in love with U.S. educational standards, Alex is a young man of initiative, always able to feel at home in a new group which he will charm and lead into mutually beneficial common action. He will bring a delicate, sophisticated touch and tons of subtlety, all in all the type of approach that wins you over smoothly to his cause without even being aware of it. Intelligence and a solid humanistic background tend to grant him a mature outlook, quite different from his peers’ and definitely ahead of them. 10. Corina’s maturity and fine intellect motivated me to invite her to become my research assistant and she worked with me for three years on various projects. All these projects (mostly the publication of books and the acquisition of images) required intense concentration, accuracy, and the ability to remain alert to nuances. She performed with excellence, was always punctual to meetings, worked with enthusiasm, and did painstaking research with an extraordinary sense of humor. 11. Daria was one of the most articulate and thoughtful students I encountered during my tenure at the University of Bucharest. Such a designation is especially noteworthy given the caliber of students I was fortunate enough to meet while teaching in Romania. Our course was an interdisciplinary study of the individual in society, and it served as a springboard for Daria to begin work on self/other relationships. She was especially taken by our reading of Charles Taylor’s ideas of identity and the dialogical self that became a fundamental component to her master’s thesis. In this thesis, she turned to studying autobiographies, in particular that of Nicolae Steinhardt, a Romanian theologian and mid-20th century dissident, and Thomas Merton. Her thesis was extremely well received in her department, and I still refer to it from time to time in my own writing on identity issues. Daria is a person quite comfortable with herself and her communicative abilities; she quickly established herself as a leader in our “social life” course which was
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taught in English. She has the unique characteristics that make her a true “academic” in that she is a critical thinker with extensive background knowledge in literature and cultural studies. However, she is unlike many of her Romanian counterparts in that she can “think out of the box” and does not hesitate to offer up new and creative ways of interpreting old concepts. Final paragraph 1. Adriana has been the student every teacher wants to work with: intelligent and passionate about learning. As the General School Inspector of Valcea County once said, we all dream to teach only students like her. She has an excellent potential for future success, and I am convinced she will be one of the greatest scientists of the future generation. Considering all these, I enthusiastically recommend her for admission to your university. 2. Laurentiu is also an accomplished volleyball player and if we add this to his love of music, we will end up with the image of the well-rounded personality of a young man whom I have no hesitation in recommending to your college as I am convinced he will not only make the most of it, but will also enhance the student body. He is one of those students who will mature into a truly accomplished professional and caring individual who is bound to make a difference in the world around him, as he has both the necessary qualities and the determination to do so. 3. We are thrilled that we got the chance to interact with Paula so productively, not only as an advisee but also as a valued team member. We see over 4,000 students at our center in one year and are confident that this multi-faceted, reliable, and mature student will make the most of what the U.S. campus has to offer, at the same time contributing significantly to the whole range of academic and extracurricular activities. We feel that, given Paula’s open and inquisitive mind, her thirst for self-development and knowledge, as well as her subtle charm and wit, she will thrive on a U.S. campus and enrich it in unique ways. 4. Laura’s peers admire, respect, and like her. She is talented in music, organizing events, and has demonstrated acumen in museum work as well. She is imaginative, has a sparkling, inquisitive personality, a keen intelligence, and clear, thoughtful views; she is recognized as an exemplary leader. I strongly support her application with the conviction she will become the best and most exciting Romanian student that you have had in years. 5. Dana will make a first-rate doctoral student, and I offer my strongest support for her application. If I can provide additional information, please feel free to contact me at the following address: ……@....... 6. In order to get the most out of his special penchants for science, culture and communication and to raise his intellectual level, the courses offered by your university represent an optimum framework for his development. Here, more than anywhere else,
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his intellectual promise will be fulfilled. I think that he has all the necessary qualities to be an expert in every career that he might choose and therefore I am recommending him with great enthusiasm for admissions to Yale University.
Enjoy our reference material and remember that the Fulbright Educational Advising Center is able to comprehensively support you in your endeavors to pursue a U.S. education! December 2013
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