Letters of Reference

Letters of Reference

I get a lot of requests from students about writing a letter of reference for them or serving as a job reference. The number of such requests has increased, so I thought I'd explain some points here.

I certainly wish you well, but two considerations come into play. One, there is the effort involved in putting together letters or even talking to people, especially the recruiter types who would make you fill a long form over the phone. Two, in most settings, for a letter to be useful, it should be a strong letter. For example, if I say someone was in the top 40% of the class, that would be interpreted as negative. People want to hear at least top 10%; some prefer top 5%.

The time and effort spent in preparing such letters is an important factor, because even an hour is a lot. Remember you are not the only one, and this time cuts into my vanishingly small discretionary time.

Despite the above, I would always support students whose dissertations or theses I have supervised. If you are such a student, you can assume that I will support you, unless you are doing something horrible :-). However, please note that it is in your interest to give me a lot of time to think about your letters: weeks if not months. It is in your interest that I draft a strong letter and not have typos in it. I will draft one letter, not a customized one for each job that you might apply to.
For students whose work I have not supervised, I can write letters, but it is a lower priority. In particular, you should either have done exceedingly well in a course with me or taken more than one course with me. Recommendation forms generally ask for how long the recommender has interacted with the candidate. If it is just one semester, it is usually too little.
I can make exceptions to the above for small requests. A good example is an email to our department's grad office if you are applying to transfer into our grad program. A bad example is a stack of letters to send all kinds of places. I have also suffered from a kind of bait and switch where a student mentioned an interest in applying to 3 places and then dropped off 20 paper forms.
Even in the cases where I can help, what I can do is is send a single letter to multiple recipients. I can even upload the letter. But I can't fill out Web forms. It just isn't a good use of my time, so I hope you understand.
I can't do head-hunter references.
Reference checks about your employment history should go to NCSU HR or to the department or to the grad office -- anyone but me :-). Since this is proving difficult for some students, I can offer to do such references in exchange for your first month's salary :-).