If the student is exceptional, it’s difficult to condense all the admirable qualities into one formal dispatch. If the student is unexceptional, it’s even harder because it’s a struggle to find enough good things to fill out the page. Whatever your prof has written, you can usually be confident it took a while to write. Occasionally a busy prof will fire off a slapdash missive-I once had a university call to tell that a letter was so poorly done that I had better get another one and fast-but that’s unusual.īased on my own letters and those I’ve read while serving on various committees, most spend a lot of time on letters. This confidentiality helps ensure candor, but it leaves the student to fret over the letter’s contents. If it does go to the student, it comes sealed in an envelope with the prof’s signature over the seal to avoid peeking and tampering.
Often the letter goes directly to the school, bypassing the student completely. Now, as a professor who has written dozens upon dozens of reference letters for scholarships, grad programs-once to help a student get an apartment-I can see how nerve-wracking the process must be for those doing the asking.įor one thing, much of the procedure is secret. When I was a student I was always respectful when asking for letters, lest my profs be offended and take out their anger on me in the same way. So, in a fit of pique, he savages them: “treacherous, never turn your back on him” he says of one he describes the mind of another as “flat as Holland-the salt marshes, not the tulip fields.” Worse, his students have irked him by making requests at the last minute and expecting him to pay for postage.
In Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, Simon Darcourt takes up the task of writing letters of reference for his students when he happens to be in a bad mood.
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