Comments on: Fall Activities – Travel, Teaching and Letters

By: Belizean

Belizean — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:35:31 +0000

I think that the practice of requiring letters of recommendation for career advancement is harmful to academic physics. Asking for such a letter is very much like asking a colleague for $5000 — extremely distasteful and actually beyond the capacity of certain personality types. I’ve known talented physicists who have left for industry rather than continuing to undergo the repeated torture of having to asks for recommendations each time they apply for a job.

By: Moshe

Moshe — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:26:10 +0000

Hey Mark, I’d also appreciate a post about reading letters, seems to me much more difficult than writing them. Many of them seem to be written in code, and your job is to wade through all the enthusiastic and over the top superlatives, and decide which of them are faint praise…pretty difficult to do if you don’t know the writer personally.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:55:59 +0000

Hi Rhys – nice to see you here. My own answers to these are that I have been asked that question by a handful of people. Of those, I refused one, two others decided not to ask me to write after I told them I could write a positive but not glowing letter for the kinds of position they wanted me to write for, and a couple more in the same situation had me go ahead and write anyway.

At the graduate level and above, you are far more frequently being asked by people with whom you’ve had a successful and enjoyable research collaboration, and so it doesn’t arise too often.

By: Rhys

Rhys — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:36:57 +0000

I have two related questions for those out there that are regularly asked to write recommendation letters:
- How often do you get asked by somebody you would hesitate to recommend for a position?
- How do you say `no’ to them (assuming you do)?

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:12:08 +0000

I’ve always suspected as much. in fact, when I’ve “been” there, I think they probably just flew around and round and dropped me off in Florida.

By: Gavin Flower

Gavin Flower — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:00:07 +0000

@Mark,

You’re right, you spotted that the existence of a Southern hemisphere is merely a hoax…

By: Sili

Sili — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:07:37 +0000

Hmmm – given how I sorta fell out of my ph.d. I think I don’t think I’d be able to get a recommendation from supervisor. Of course, I don’t know for sure, since I haven’t had the courage to go back since then.

I did get some letters of reference for my ph.d. I think, but I’m not sure really. What I do recall is applying for a grant (quite a good one) for my masters, where I needed a coupla references – three, I think. In that case I made a point of getting one for the professor I felt I’d done the worst with – in maths, which was my minor. Because I’m perverse that way. I don’t recall the third, but I think the first was from my B.Sc. advisor.

By: Shoubaneh

Shoubaneh — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:24:32 +0000

Getting good Recommendation Letters is way harder than writing them. I think it should be omitted at least from the graduate application process! This way professors will have more time and I won’t receive a recommendation letter saying I look like some other student!

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:16:11 +0000

Hi Eugene. That was my reaction when I was first asked as a postdoc. The person in question pointed out though that although some Professors knew him from classes, I could write about the work we’d been doing together, That made some sense to me, and so I wrote. It seemed to work out OK for him.

From the perspective of a letter reader, I can’t speak for everyone, but I would say that it is natural to prefer a detailed letter from an experienced faculty member than the same letter from a postdoc, just because of experience and calibration. However, I think a detailed letter from a senior postdoc with direct experience of the candidate’s research would be more useful than a letter from a faculty member who only knows the student from classes.

In general though, I’d say that what you did is basically what I’d advocate – i.e. make sure the candidate sees the pros and cons of having you write (even though you may write a good letter) and then let them make an informed decision.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:59:22 +0000

Hi Mark,

I have been asked to write letters of recommendation more than once, as a postdoc, and I’ve always given the same response “I will be very happy to, but are you sure this is the best thing for you to ask a postdoc to write one?”. That’s an honest answer — it is an honor (that comes with responsibility) to be asked, but in that vein, I also think that as a postdoc, I am under the impression that my writing a letter may not be in the best interests of the recommendee.

As a letter reader now, do you (or any reader of this blog who evaluates letters) have an opinion on whether postdocs make good letter writers, even if they can write a stonking good letter?

Eugene