Cornell大学教授关于推荐信的建议

不知道还有没有人没整完RL了，无意中发现了这个，感觉说的挺好
http://vlsi.cornell.edu/~rajit/recletters.html

Advice to Students Asking for Recommendation Letters
Every year I get a large number of requests from students that ask me for recommendation letters. This page is a summary of my advice to you, based on my experience as someone who has written letters for students over the years as well as read a large number of letters from prospective graduate students applying to Ph.D. programs. (Disclaimer: this applies to those interested in a top-tier research-oriented school.)
The first thing you should realize is that if the only thing I know about you is your performance in my class, my letter is likely going to look like the following:

"I know X because s/he took my class Y. X's performance in the class was [insert words here], and his/her rank was Z. Overall, I believe X will do [insert words here] in a graduate program. I [insert words here] recommend him/her to you."
This sort of letter is useless, and does not count for anything. Everything I've said in the letter can be found (more or less) in your transcript. Also note that giving me a copy of your statement of purpose will not change this letter in any way. Even if you have done an outstanding project in another class or a project with another professor, I will not comment on it unless I have some personal knowledge about it. Any information of this sort will be in your statement, and so I am not going to repeat it.
If you have taken my class but you stood out in some way that is not clear from your grade, then I can explain that in the letter. This is not easy in most of the large classes I teach, but it has happened on a couple of occasions (couple = less than 1% of students I've taught).

A strong letter is one where I can say specific things about your research potential. An example of such a letter is:

I know X because s/he took my class Y. X received a B in my course, and was ranked 24th out of 90 students. Toward the end of the semester, I was approached by X who expressed interest in writing tools to validate asynchronous pipelines based on his/her frustrations with the lack of design automation. X had many ideas about the subject, and after an initial discussion with me came back a month later with a prototype checker that could validate basic properties of simple pipeline structures. Since then, s/he has come up with many new ideas for algorithms based on classifying pipeline structures into different categories. The basic prototype checker has been expanded to include a theorem prover that can provide sophisticated checking for conditions when simple analysis fails. We are in the process of preparing a paper on the subject that will be submitted to Z. I think X is an outstanding candidate for any graduate program. I would admit him/her to my group without hesitation. I give X my highest recommendation.
This letter is strong because it contains information about the student's creativity, research potential, independence, initiative, and drive. It also says I was sufficiently impressed to take on the student even though the student did not do that well in my class.
Ideally, all your letters would read like this one. To have a good chance of admission to a top-tier Ph.D. program, you should have at least one letter of this type.

Doing a project with me but not doing a good job is probably worse than my not knowing anything about you. Even if you couldn't do a good job because you were too busy taking classes, it shows that research was not a priority for you.

After I finished writing this page, I found the document "Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science" written by Mor Harchol-Balter. Her views are very similar in spirit to mine, and reading her document would be very instructive.

受教了，细节啊细节

感觉这种RL必须是有灰常有底气的老师写出来的，但是这种底气不见得每位同学找的推荐人都有···

感觉这种RL必须是有灰常有底气的老师写出来的，但是这种底气不见得每位同学找的推荐人都有···
reneeme 发表于 2011-11-9 19:23

恩，其实我觉得与其说灰常有底气的老师，还不如说灰常有特点的申请人，呵呵

拉倒吧，自己动手写成这样就行，不过别夸大，做自己就好。

听君一席话，胜读十年书啊。。。。。。

不太适合中国学生老师现状吧  > <

1 Doing a project with me but not doing a good job is probably worse than my not knowing anything about you.
  什么意思呢？前面不是说 It also says I was sufficiently impressed to take on the student even though the student did not do that well in my class.
   好吧,我阅读太差了....

2 现在写推荐信，不都是自己写，然后老师签字么？这样的话 是不是随便写点好的就行了啊？ 老师会不会拒绝签字呢？
写RL的时候，要找老师商量商量内容，然后让他修改？这样会不会很麻烦人家？...我总觉得找教授写推荐信，会很占用人家时间，有点想求人帮忙...

回复 8# xytan123

1. 一个说的是Doing a project, 一个是does well in class. 研究能力和学习能力还是有区别的。
2. 恩，大多数都是这样的。当然也不乏有很nice的老师亲自帮你写和修改。自己提供一份sample还是会比较好的。

对
推荐信的大忌就是一些笼统的概念，什么总是第一排，认真听课，问问题之类的