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.

These continuous enrollment policies remind you that schools are in the business of making money

This memo below was sent out to all department chairs, graduate studies chairs, and graduate program administrative support staff at OSU. I don't think it was intended to be read by students or anyone else, but it got forwarded to the student list, and they haven't taken me off of that list yet. For brevity, I'm omitting the PDF that was attached to the memo.

I have always thought these continuous enrollment policies (and limits on funding based on a credit hour ceiling) were slimy. It's even slimier when you read this memo which initially says it is in the benefit of the student to finish their doctorate quickly but then at the end says that it ensures the college is making money.

Patrick S. Osmer, Vice Provost and Dean
February 28, 2011

TO:
Department Chairs
Graduate Studies Committee Chairs
Graduate Program Administrative Support Staff


Colleagues:

I am writing to remind you of the Continuous Enrollment Policy that is in effect for all students who were admitted to the Graduate School autumn quarter 2008 and after. We are receiving petitions for exemption from the policy, which we need to have approved by the college before we can consider them, as I ex­plain below.

Simply put, this policy requires all post-candidacy students to be enrolled for a minimum of three credit hours every quarter (excluding summer quarter) until graduation. I am including a copy of the policy for your convenience. Recall that the policy is an outcome of the process that led to the reduction of full-time enrollment for post-candidacy students to three credit hours. One specific goal of continuous enrollment is to reduce time to degree for doctoral students by having them formally engaged with their program and the university. Going away to teach somewhere else with the intent to finish the dissertation off campus, for example, is not in the student’s best interests or the university’s.

A student may apply for a leave of absence due to extenuating circumstances such as the birth or adoption of a child or a serious medical condition, but a leave will not be granted with the sole reason of financial hardship.

If a student is requesting an exemption from continuous enrollment due to circumstances not covered by the leave of absence as stated in the Graduate School Handbook, I am asking that he or she direct that petition to the dean’s office for your review. The college may choose to cover the cost of the post-candidacy enrollment for an individual student and we will work with the college to manage that process. I remind you that according to the current budget model, the net marginal revenue to the college will be positive for a student who enrolls for three hours and for whom the college covers the (standard) fee au­thorization.

We continue to communicate this policy to students and to graduate programs and appreciate your assis­tance with that process. Please let me know if you have further questions.

Sincerely,

Pat

250 University Hall
230 N. Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210-1366
PH:(614) 247-7413
FAX:(614) 292-3656

Currently, students get into their post-candidacy period as soon as possible and must keep 3-hour enrollment per quarter. Before that, students were urged to do their candidacy a year before defending their dissertation (so the candidacy started the "writing year"). In general, students were asked to maintain 15-hour enrollment (because it was good for individual department budgets). But then the state got involved and started to crank down on the maximum number of hours a doctoral student could accumulate... and things went down hill from there. So now we have early candidacies and lots of mandatory 3-hour enrollment. By the way, if you didn't get the hint, students don't actually take any classes during these 3- or 15-hour enrollment periods; they take (and someone pays for) "research hours". "Research hours" are usually not given letter grades (although some universities give them letter grades, which helps graduate students to buffer their GPA's against some classes that they actually do have to take), and they rarely require any deliverables to pass them. They are throw away classes invented by bean counters.

Dr. Bernoulli gets a job: Mathematics of the Job Search – Faculty Version

I recently found out that the Duke Computer Science department had 404 applicants for the open position in their department. I mentioned that to a CS professor from a different university, and he didn't seem surprised by that number. Moreover, when you think about how many "faculty candidate" lectures there usually are within a CS-like department each hiring season, and you consider that those interviewees are likely a small selection of the total applicants, then 404 starts sounding reasonable.

When there are 404 applicants who each have PhD degrees, publications, and possible post-doctoral or existing faculty appointments, let's also assume that the objective function that each department is maximizing is pretty flat. If you don't like that assumption, then assume we have no prior information, and so we will maximize entropy and assume that each applicant has a 1/404 chance of being picked for the job (in reality, this probability is itself conditioned on whether the state steps in and has a hiring freeze... so the real probability might be closer to 1/1000). So that is a very low number. Can we fight low probability with high volume of applications?

Assume we apply to N schools where the probability of getting an offer is

p = 1/404

at each of them. Then the probability of not getting an offer from each of them is

1 - p = 403/404,

and so the probability of not getting an offer from all of them is

(1 - p)^N = (403/404)^N.

So finally we arrive at the probability of getting an offer from at least one of them, which is

1 - (1 - p)^N = 1 - (403/404)^N.

Hypothetically speaking, let's say you apply to N = 50 such positions. Then you have a

1 - (403/404)^N = 1 - (403/404)⁵⁰ ≈ 11.65%

probability of getting the offer. Of course, if you were paying attention, you remember that p (1/404) is very small in this example. Consequently, the (1 - (1 - p)^N) curve looks linear for a wide region around the origin. So even though you remember your fourth-grade math teacher teaching you that you cannot additively accumulate probabilities (i.e., your probability of getting a job is not (N × p)), in this small-p case, it is a pretty decent approximation. In particular, even with our ostensibly large N, it is the case that

N × p = (50)(1/404) ≈ 12.38%,

which is pretty close to our slightly more dismal 11.65%.

In December, I ran into a woman who just got finished submitting all of her faculty positions. She said she applying to just 10 of them because she was exhausted and figured she was just practicing this round. Setting N = 10 reduces your chances to 2.45%. Having said that, the distribution across the applicant pool is certainly not flat. Her home institution, research, adviser, and other factors make her a very attractive candidate who will likely do well with such a low N... In fact, she was recently interviewed at a university near me (that, again, may have to deal with hiring freezes, etc., in the near future).

Now, in my case... Maybe I should burn my CV and dust off my résumé... I hope I'm not too old and outdated.

Updated LaTeX document class for Ohio State University (OSU) graduate school dissertation and thesis documents

Back in 1996, The Ohio State University Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department made available LaTeX2e support files including a document class that complied with the graduate school's format for dissertations (see samples pages, guidelines, templates, and other resources from the graduate school). The resulting osudissert96.cls and osudissert96-mods.sty from the ECE department was kept up to date through 1998, but it was left to lapse out of compliance after several format updates from the graduate school (including a recent one in 2009). Additionally, the graduate school only officially supports helping students with documents "typeset" in Microsoft Word (and even their Word templates may require a more recent version than they claim on the website).

So back when I put together my dissertation (which has source code available to review) in 2010, I updated those old ECE templates for the 2010 format. I tried to make them backward compatible with the old osudissert96 to make them nice drop-in replacements for anyone using the outdated versions. You can find them at:

• http://links.tedpavlic.com/zip/osudissert10.zip
• http://links.tedpavlic.com/zip/sample-osudissert10.zip

For the most part, the old osudissert96 documentation still applies. However, it might be better just browsing through the sample and/or using the sample as a template for your own document. To get the sample up and running,

1. Unzip sample-osudissert10.zip.
2. Unzip osudissert10.zip.
3. Put the CLS and STY files from osudissert10.zip into the same directory as the files from sample-osudissert10.zip
4. Build the sample dissertation with:
   1. pdflatex Thesis.tex
   2. bibtex Thesis.aux
   3. pdflatex Thesis.tex
   4. pdflatex Thesis.tex
5. Review the resulting Thesis.pdf file, which also includes documentation on how to get your own dissertation up and running.

There is also a README file in sample-osudissert10.zip that basically says the same as above. Experts may just need the files in osudissert10.zip, but it will still be useful to see the quick reference in Appendix B of the sample dissertation. Note that the documentclass is still called osudissert96.cls even though the zip file is called osudissert10.zip; this choice was made for compatibility with old dissertations using the old files.

I hope that helps someone out there. I probably won't be monitoring the graduate school format policies now that I am not in graduate school anymore, but I am usually happy to help with "how-to-modify" questions over e-mail (if I have time). Good luck!