Who should write you a letter of recommendation?

[this was originally posted as a Medium article]

There are a few times every year when faculty members are bombarded with requests to write letters of recommendation for students. Sadly, we do not do a good job telling undergraduate students what kinds of relationships they should be building with faculty to ensure that when the time comes (e.g., applying for graduate school or medical school), there will be two or three different faculty who feel comfortable writing a recommendation letter.

A good recommendation letter must do much more than just verifying a grade in a class. Students applying for graduate school will be asked to submit verified transcripts, and so the veracity of reported grades will not be in question. Furthermore, if all a letter writer can do is verify a grade in a course, then that actually speaks negatively for the student because it indicates that the student could not find a letter writer who could supply a stronger message. In fact, some of the best letters are from faculty who can address why an admissions committee should overlook a low GPA or a poor grade. The best letters are not about grades, they are about people.

Students should keep in mind that every person that they ask to write them a letter will be given a form like the one below and an opportunity (which is expected that they will take) to write a 1–2 page free response reflecting on the student and their potential for the program for which they are applying.

Example questions from an actual recommendation letter form for a graduate school application (click to expand)

Although the forms for each graduate program have slightly different questions, they all ask questions very similar to the ones above. If a student asks me for a letter, and I have never had an office-hours conversation with the student before (let alone exchanged an e-mail), it would be very difficult for me to attempt an answer to any of those questions above. At a minimum, I need to understand a student’s career goals and motivations for graduate study. It is ideal if I have worked with the student on a project (e.g., undergraduate research), but often just one or two good conversations during office hours is enough for me to attempt answers to the questions above and even write a one-page letter that does much more than just confirm the reported grade for my course.

So, choose wisely when picking letter writers. The best letters are going to be very personal and specific to your case and will address any parts of your application that you think might make you look weaker than other candidates (e.g., a low GPA or low grades). How do you make sure you will be able to pick a good letter writer? Start early. If you have time, try to get involved in some projects with faculty so that they have experience working directly with you. But even if you can’t do that, just go to office hours and chat with the faculty member about your career goals. Ask questions about graduate school, and maybe you’ll learn something interesting.

If you didn’t know to do this during your undergraduate degree, it’s not too late to schedule a meeting with one of your old professors. Tell them that you are considering graduate school and wanted to ask a few questions and get their reflections about your chosen career path. Just ten or fifteen minutes in conversation is enough to turn a recommendation letter into something that looks like it was written by a robot to something that will go a long way to getting you passed the admissions committee.

Removing WiFind

The WiFind application from TastyApps has potential, but in the end it falls short and is not worth all of the bother. WiFind will slow down your computer nearly to a halt in some cases. Because the developers made it an input manager without a preference pane, it cannot easily be turned off. Even when it's running well, it still takes a click or two in order to get it to display the information you need.

The free application coconutWiFi is almost identical to WiFind, but because it's an application, it's much easier to install, load, unload, and uninstall.

Getting rid of WiFind can be a major pain (especially if it's in the process of grinding your machine to a halt at the time). The developers gave it an installer (because it's an input manager and not an application), but despite Apple's guidelines that all programs with installers must have uninstallers, they did not give it an uninstaller.

So, here's how I went about turning OFF WiFind. WiFind uses this InputManager called "SIMBL" to modify the wireless menu directly (rather than putting up its own menu, like coconutWiFi). So, you can either remove SIMBL or remove WiFind from SIMBL so that while SIMBL loads, WiFind will not.

To remove WiFind only, look for the folder

/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

or the folder

~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

where ~ is your home directory. Inside that folder, you'll find a WiFind.bundle. Move it somewhere else (or delete it) and logout (or restart) to disable/remove WiFind.

Alternatively/additionally, you can remove SIMBL. Look in the folder:

/Library/InputManagers

or

~/Library/InputManagers

where ~ is your home directory. There should be a SIMBL folder inside one of these. To remove SIMBL, delete the SIMBL folder. To disable it, remove the SIMBL folder. Again, be sure to logout or restart after making this change. When you're logged back in, SIMBL should not be loaded.

If you think you will want to turn this off later, simply move the SIMBL folder out of the InputManagers folder and into some other folder that you create (I created an InputManagersOff folder in my /Library). Next, if you logout (or restart), WiFind will not be started. At some time, you should probably also get rid of the folders

/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/

and

~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/

where ~ is your home directory.

You might notice that there are files dropped in /Library/Receipts (or maybe ~/Library/Receipts) from WiFind (or wifind) and SIMBL. You may consider removing these files too, but it won't hurt to leave them there.

Desktop Manager for OS X

This is not anything new, but there is a very nice freeware (open source) Desktop Manager for OS X. That is, this implements virtual desktops (i.e., multiple desktops that you can switch between; this lets you spread your apps across different screens).

It has a lot of cool features.