Electronically Signing Letter of Recommendation Template for Coworker Made Easy

Electronically signing letter of recommendation template for coworker

hello there this is Kevin Heights and welcome to our second video in our 2019 webinar series for our admissions essays and this one is on how to write a graduate letter of recommendation so today we're going to talk about how to craft a letter that will get you into graduate school and we'll go through a lot of details about writing the letter whether you are the person writing it or the one asking referee to write it and if you your referee needs some help you can send this video to them so before we get started I want to tell you a bit about word vise and our services we edit all kinds of admissions essays that includes the statement of purpose this letter of recommendation we get hundreds of these every admissions season we also do research papers and dissertations and any kind of documents for college or university so please do check us out and if you are registered for this webinar by October 14th you can get a 10% discount on your first admissions order so I want to go through some of the content we'll be discussing we're going to talk about the purpose of the recommendation letter what it does who should write it and some of the details that your recommender should know about you or if you are writing it for the recommender what's or details you should include and what information documents you might need to know to put in there what information your recommender should know and then we're going to go into a lot more detail and look at the template of a recommendation letter and some very useful phrases and go through actually a couple of recommendation letter samples so that you can see how the useful phrases fit into a real recommendation letter and we have two examples of those today so let's first look at this I thought this was fun a less-than-ideal recommendation letter and this one was written for John Nash who was a famous mathematician created the Nash triangle I believe this is not the kind of recommendation letter you want it's obviously too short and the referee just says this is to recommend that John Nash who has applied for entrance at Princeton he's 19 years old and he's graduating he's a genius so unless you have a letter from an extremely distinguished professor who who is well known throughout the their academic circles you probably want a little bit more detail about you than this so the purpose of the recommendation letter is to tell the graduate faculty or the official officials that are admitting you to the University about you and this should be written in in a detailed third-person discussion of your personal qualities accomplishments and experiences so the referee is talking about you but from their perspective so you actually have first-person and third-person perspectives the things that should be included are the relationship between you as a recommended recommender or the I should preface this by saying that the perspective we will mostly be discussing is that of the recommender whether you are the students or the recommender you should think about writing the letter from the recommenders perspective I realize a lot of times especially in ESL situations the student might be responsible for writing the letter but you might have to give the referee your letter to check over and make sure everything is accurate and that they agree to this letter as well so whoever is responsible for writing this mom needs to be aware of these details so you need to include a relationship what how you know the applicants the student you want to talk about the positive characteristics of the applicants you want to show the applicants character skills and abilities so give concrete details that evidence why they're so good why you're recommending them and then you want to explain why they'd be suitable for the specific program as far as who should write the letters and I mentioned here that there's two letters at least because for most programs they require two letters so whatever you choose for one letter you want the other referee to be someone who's not the exact same of referee so at least one letter should be from a past or current professor or academic advisors so someone from your undergraduate career or graduate career if you're in grad school now and the second letter should be from an employer a research advisor another colleague or a professor from a different department so you don't want two professors say from psychology department with whom you've had classes you want to try to find some diversity so you get more perspectives okay you want to make sure that your recommender is someone who knows you well and can actually talk about your accomplishments you don't want to ask a random teacher that you don't have a rapport with to write you a letter they also need to understand a little bit about the program that you are applying to the graduate program and they should be able to say very positive things about you in your letters you need to cover a range of skills you don't need to be extremely specific it depends on the program it depends how well the referee knows you and knows your skills and knows the understands the program but they need to talk about your academic skills any research abilities that you've demonstrated your specific experiences in class or in the internship or in a research setting and any applied experiences they can also write about your personal qualities but those should be shown through your actual activities and your your accomplishments not only saying that you are a great student but what have you done to prove that and they should answer these questions so all of these questions should be easily answered in in the letter what is your relationship with the student why should the Graduate faculty listen to your opinion that means why is this professor or this instructor or colleague someone that is important enough that the faculty should listen to so you need to talk about your credentials what makes this student this candidates special so qualities traits and personal characteristics and then after that what specifically did the student do then pressed you enough to for you to give permission to write a letter for you to accept writing a letter and what makes this student is qualified for this specific graduate school and program so the more you know about about this program the more you can talk about why this program is prestigious or what specific resources or faculty or courses it has that the student will fit into so if it's someone this happens a lot if you've been out of school for a while if you haven't been in touch with your recommender you should send them a background information file and it should include all of this information classes you've taken experiences transcripts if it's pertinent Awards etc anything that reminds the the recommender who you are and what you've done so if you're the one writing this you might use these as well but you don't want to be too specific and talk about your GPA on your transcript or go into a lot of details about your job because you have to realize this is a limited amount of space about one page that you have some other information that you want to send to the recommender it would be the application due date and before we go on you should know that you should do this at least send this information at least one month before you need the letter so that the recommender has sufficient amount of time to write it for you and that they are there are busy people so you need to give them enough time to do this you can include a copy of recommendation forms if they there need to be specific forms any instructions for submitting some schools demand a hard copy and others a soft copy or a digital copy and some some require that you send a letter directly from the referee to the school so you need to make sure you're following the right instructions so you can find those on these details on the school's website in any details about the actual programs you're applying to should be sent to the recommender as well so they know what you're right they're recommending you for it will make it easier for them to write a letter about you so let's go right into the template the University letterhead at the top that means the the letterhead from the the school that your recommender works at so if they work at the University of california-berkeley you would have the letter it makes it more official and you have the sender's name the address the phone number so all of the pertinent information if you include too much here it's it's okay it's better to include more information so that the recommender can be contacted than too little information include the date and the recipients name and the recipients institutional address this may or may not be required so again look at the examples and the instructions from your specific school before proceeding let's go through each section of the recommendation letter to see what information is usually displayed in what order we start with a greeting so that is usually dear and then the name if you know the name of the Graduate faculty your professor O'Shaughnessy or to whom it may concern this is a very common one because we don't know exactly to whom the letter is going or it could be to the Graduate Faculty of this university if your recommender knows which university you're applying to then use the specific University if you're applying to multiple universities make sure that you put the correct University and department or program on the greeting the first paragraph the opening paragraph is where you often will state your position and establish your relationship with the student and give your general assessment of the applicant so this is sort of your thesis of the letter it is my absolute pleasure to recommend students name for admission to sociology program at UC Berkeley so all these phrases in underlined in green are useful phrases that you could actually pretty much copy and paste into your letter because this language is recycled are used a lot to structure these sorts of letters in the second paragraph you're going to start discussing positive traits positive skills and maybe even showing evidence of the trait or skill and talking about anecdotes or short stories that demonstrate the students trait for example if the student is hardworking you can discuss what they've done in your course to show that they're hardworking here's an example Jane has excellent communication skills her written work is both clear and concise as well as interesting to read okay so the main trait is communication skills the evidence is her written work is clear and concise if the this recommender goes into more detail she might discuss a specific work that is clear and concise perhaps a certain paper that she worked on this establishes a closer connection between the recommender and the the applicant and moving on you can continue to talk about skills and traits and further evidence of these skills so each paragraph as we discussed in other essays such as the SOP you need to structure this with a kind of main topic followed by supporting details so this paragraph might start at a personal level Jane is a well disciplined industrious student with a pleasant personality okay she went well beyond the course expectations so and in this paragraph the author might discuss how you show how the students showed that they're well discipline in industrious and pleasant and then finally in there there could be another paragraph but these are usually one page in length they don't usually exceed a page maybe a page and a half so you aren't able to go into too many anecdotal details it needs to be concise but in the final paragraph is where you summarize and clearly recommend this candidate to the school or program you restate that this student is someone you want to recommend so here's an example jane is unquestionably an exceptional candidate for graduate study in the Anthropology program Jane's work and developments and anthropology suggests that she would greatly benefit from the opportunities for intellectual development provided by a sustained period of grad study there's a lot of ways to to this to link the student and the graduate program this is one way but this goes at the end it's like your conclusion your summary statement you can also include a closing line to remind the our call to action to remind the reader what your that that you are writing this letter for a very specific purpose or in this case the closing line is telling the reader that they can contact the professor this is not always included it's kind of assumed in most cases but if if if you do include this it shows that the author is open to being to being contacted and that tells the the graduate faculty that this letter is a little bit more official okay so let's look at our first sample letter of recommendation everything you see here in brackets and bold is information that you could put you could almost take this as a template and put your own information in the bracketed sections so the first line is the greeting to the recipient recipient dear graduate faculty or to whom it may concern it is my pleasure to recommend Jane Doe for admission to your program and then she talks about what her position is right away I am an associate professor of math at UC Berkeley I came to know Jane how they how she came to know the student so as you can see in this template the simple it's right at the beginning so position what is the relationship between the author and the student Jane distinguished herself by submitting an exceptionally well researched and interesting projects on the hominid artifacts in the eluvian Gorge she is one of the very best students that I've taught in the past five years in respect to her writing ability and research skills so pretty good opening this author chooses to start with a specific a very specific example of how the student herself and that's one way to begin so position relationship general assessment of the applicant will go into another positive trait Jane is a highly intelligent is highly intelligent and has good problem-solving skills so the remainder of this paragraph will be discussing how she demonstrated that her alluvion Gords project demonstrated her ability to come to a detailed understanding of blah blah blah right so this author is linking the exact curriculum details with the student and showing how the student showed competence in this area which is extremely important in graduate in graduate school and the third paragraph this author discusses another traits another skill excellent communication skills so we can already assume the rest of this paragraph is going to be discussing her communication her work is both clear and concise as interest and as well as interesting to read she demonstrated her oral articulate nests in the discussion sections that were an integral part of the course so more and more detail as you go on in the paragraph and although this teacher discusses alluvion Gorge this could be a professor that only knows the student in the context of this class and that's okay if you don't have an extremely close relationship with your recommender you don't want to pretend and make up something that you do you don't want to just say I really love this applicant she excels in everything she does she's motivational because it doesn't sound genuine it doesn't sound realistic but real concrete facts and details such as these show the reader that the author is focusing on specific accomplishments of the student okay major skills major qualities and anecdotes anecdotes in the fourth paragraph they discuss another trait so we'll go into personal details at a personal level Jane is well disciplined industrious student with a pleasant personality how does she demonstrate this well she went well beyond the course requirements and the quantity and quality of her project putting in a lot of extra research and attending off Sowers so this doesn't necessarily pertain to the GPA the test scores the quality the quality of her work but it shows that she has the drive the discipline and the other high-level personality traits that it takes to excel in graduate school so this is a very important paragraph too and it also shows that this author knows Jane a little bit more than maybe just a typical professor might know a student in this final paragraph we have the call to action why this student will fit in with this program so you'll see that the author the recommender shows that she he or she understands the program that the student is applying for Jane is unquestioningly unquestionably an exceptional candidate for graduate study this this line is repeated a little bit it's it's a little changed changed a little bit throughout the essay but that's okay this is sort of a reiteration just a reminder that the this letter is for the purpose of recommending you for a program so she's unquestionably it can't in questionably exceptional candidate for graduate study in this specific program her work in this course whatever the course is suggests that she would greatly benefit from the opportunities for development provided by a sustained period of graduate study so she's mentioned the author's mentioned the course that she was in charge of and how Jane would benefit from this course she's also showing that her her qualities would make her a good student and therefore help build the program in the school that she's applying for she has perseverance initiative and intellectual creativity she's a good fit for the program and the program is will help the student as well and then finally in a separate line we have if the closing if I can be of any further assistance or provide you with further information do not hesitate to contact me this is template stuff you could copy and paste this this doesn't really change much from letter to letter okay so you'll see in the next the next essay that we look at that it has the similar structure but it might be a little bit shorter or a little bit lower on details but it has all of the parts there but first let's look at some useful template phrases that you can plug in to your recommendation letter use these template phrases to clearly and naturally express your support so I've broken these down by section the first section is introducing yourself and these are just some of the ways to do it you don't have to use these but as I have mentioned there are a limited number of phrases that you see in these kind of letters my name is author's name and I have been a professor of math at my university since date so immediately establishing yourself your credentials you could also write I want I write to you today to proudly express my support for the student in applying to your prestigious University and note that in every paragraph especially the first time you mentioned the student's name you should use their full name so when I write student here that means the student's name not pronoun not his or her or he or she but used the student's name first but you don't have to repeat their name every time so if you write their name one time in the paragraph the the consecutive iterations of their name can be just pronouns he/she next in the essay you were discussing your relationship with the student I first came to know the student while teaching him/her in my course in my anthropology course and you can give more details about that course or I was jane doe's thesis advisor during his senior year junior year I have known Jane Doe for several years now and can attest to hit her strengths and quality of character and these I've put these in template statements because there's not a lot of detail right you have to fill in the detail after you write these after you put these template statements in you have to put the concrete details in in the next section next paragraph you could discuss their positive traits Jane Doe has excellent communication skills how give the details she is a highly intelligent and competent student who excels in many areas what are these areas how does she excel not only as Jane Doe not only is Jane hardworking and thoughtful but she's also demonstrates kindness and generosity towards her peers how give the details afterwards for demonstrating evidence of their skills you can use these template these template pair sentences as well he has shown himself to be a true leader who is able to successfully develop plans and implement them in his or her work the next line should probably be about those plans John Doe demonstrated his independence daily completing difficult lab exercises by researching outside the class this would work if the student has actually done lab exercises during her internship Jane Doe consistently managed her work responsibilities diligently and learned quickly notice also there's a lot of kind of power adjectives and nouns responsibilities and adverbs diligently quickly consistently and you have words like excellent you have nouns like communicator verbs like demonstrated so it's almost like a CV if you think about the strong power verbs and and terms you use to squeeze all of the important power out of your writing you use larger and more academic level language next discussing the school and program so as Harvard University is renowned for its fine arts program I believe this is an ideal place for John to solidify his abilities and cements his knowledge of fine art the learning environment that Brown is famous for creates an excellent opportunity for John to apply his skills and finally the recommendation the summary the repetition of the purpose of the letter for the above reasons I'm confident that John will make an excellent addition to your graduate program and I wholeheartedly support him or her support him for admission to your program thank you for your time and attention in reading my endorsement this is also nice at the end to have a thank you it's it's just a pleasantry that a graduate official reading hundreds of letters will appreciate so and it's easy to include it doesn't take up many words okay so let's look at one more sample and I want you I have numbered these so you can see that each part is in line with our previous samples we have the greeting opening paragraph and then additional positive traits and skill and skills that are put in details but I haven't highlighted anything I want you to see where the template language is and where the important details are as you can see in the first paragraph the recommender immediately talks about what position she holds as a tenured professor of sociology at Beacon College I have had the pleasure of knowing knowing Julia Kim for the last four years so you don't have to make that a separate sentence you don't have to say I am a tenured professor of sociology I have known Julia you can combine that into one sentence with this sort of template as a as Julia's boss for the past three years I've come to known her and those more complex sentences will impress the Graduate faculty more as well moving on to the second paragraph we are evidencing Julia's positive skills or traits because of Julia's proven dedication to coursework and other academic endeavors I feel confident that she will continue to succeed in her graduate studies word like confident powered academic endeavors a little bit vague but we'll go into more detail not only was she one of the highest achievers in my course in 2017 she also spent much more time in my office than most students asking pertinent questions to assist her with personal study of social behavior in class she has proven to be a take-charge person who is able to fully developed work plans and implement them as you can see comparing this essay to the previous one this one lacks detail it doesn't have it's not talking about the old ovn Gorge or the specific details of her study so it might be a good idea if possible to include at least one project you worked on or at least one specific detail of what you did in class because as an editor I read a lot of these letters and if they're too vague if they just include language about academic endeavors she's great she's curious without details it doesn't stand out as much so if you if you can point to what you've accomplished in academic course then that will be something that the faculty will be interested in and it will help you stand out okay so we're gonna look at some more evidence of characters and skills and as a transition you can work use words like also or in addition or furthermore julia has also assisted us in our admissions office so this is another thing that she's done that's why they've separated it this is another activity not only class work but also she's helped us in our office she has successfully demonstrated leadership ability by counseling new and prospective students her advice has been a great help to these students so you've this recommenders shown that julia is a great student she's curious she's smart but she also is helpful and a good leader excellent traits to have in a graduate student finally we have the call to action and you can note that this first sentence sort of shows the shows the intention right away it is for these reasons that I offer high recommendations for Julia Kim without reservation sort of a template sentence as well it is for these reasons that I offer high recommendations for student X without reservation your program is among the top in the nation for urban studies and Julia demonstrates both the level of empathy and awareness so a targeting of the student to the specific program mentioning the program name you could say your universe or you could mention the University's name and then reiterating the the skills that you talked about her drive and abilities her awareness of statistics her level of empathy finally if you have any questions regarding this recommendation please do not hesitate to contact me thank you for your time in consideration so you can see that these letters are structurally run-of-the-mill they shouldn't deviate too much unless you have a really wild and creative approach that you want to try that could be risky but you do want to include details that show how exactly you are a good a good candidate for a graduate program especially if the program is competitive so let's discuss some overall writing tips and we mentioned these in our SOP at webinar as well you want to show and not tell why not just list so what does that mean telling includes few details stevan accomplished a lot during his internship what's a lot well let's see he did a lot of great work okay that's not detailed and main some significant accomplishments for our company what are these accomplishments we're still waiting for them he also motivated he also we have some grammar issues too he also motivated everyone around him the company benefited from his work one way you could fix this is to actually put details after these sentences here's one way you could show this I'm using concrete details during his eight months a tacit Pro the name of the company how long he worked there Steven excelled in his duties all right let's see how he always showed up on time and ready to work okay good even staying late several times a month to meet deadlines even more detail here which shows that it gives evidence to Stevens work ethic these actions motivated his team and led to an increase in productivity during his two quarters at our company there's so much more deep so many more details in this paragraph than this one another mistake that some authors make is to just list because they think it's it does save room but it's also really boring and it's like reading a resume without a sentence Stephen brings many professional skills to the table including we're gonna see a list here computer skills internet know how research acumen business sense common-sense planning and building relationships with coworkers one way to fix this is to cut a couple of these out a couple of these skills and and show in a smooth and natural way how they fit into Stephens performance Stephen is skilled in the gamut of important office duties from performing complex tasks on the computer and navigating the internet to boost boosting marketing to dealing with clients in a professional way to building relationships with his co-workers so you've actually taken these lists and you've made them into a sentence and that is already more natural than the original and to cap it off he's an all-around team player a little bit more words a lot more interesting writing going on in the length of the sentence is one way that you can tell that this is a more interesting and complex sentence another thing to keep in mind is you want to make your compliments of the student realistic and genuine this is less realistic less genuine soobin was the best student I ever had in the history of my class when a reader sees a sentence like this they immediately think that the author is exaggerating or even making things up or lying you can slightly modify this to make it much more genuine suebian is among the very best students I have taught in this class that's such a nice compliment to get but also it doesn't sound unrealistic it sounds very possible maybe she's the top 5% that's still a few students it's still a great compliment it's more genuine and more realistic this is less realistic less genuine she's an extremely she's extremely skilled and excels at every single thing that she puts her mind to I don't know anyone like that I know she will be one of the very best students in your graduate program I'm not sure how she could know that so let's be a little bit more realistic here she shows great aptitude at a wide variety of tasks and works hard to complete whatever she sets her mind to that's still extremely complimentary but you have great aptitude rather than extremely skilled and a wide variety of tasks versus every single thing it's more academic language and it's more realistic and she works hard so you have that extra quality of hard work put in this too I'm confident that she will excel in your program rather than be one of the best students because there's no real way to know that your student will be the best in this graduate program okay so let's go over a couple of more tips so these are general tips for any essays that you write but admissions committees are looking for these are some of the traits that they're looking for self motivation competence potential hard work these sort of traits they're not just looking for intelligence or maybe less academic traits such as modesty although that could be useful but the the more academic oriented traits are better you should emphasize opinions from your personal perspective but use objective facts be concrete in your evidence explain why the student is especially qualified for this specific program so if they're applying for a psychology program then you could use more traits described traits about empathy or open-mindedness or understanding other people that might be more useful than it would for engineering for example finally this is extremely important you don't finish their draft and send it to the school you want to rewrite it you want to get checked by peers write it again and finally you should probably get it edited if you're not a native speaker or if you don't feel super confident about your English writing abilities your essay writing abilities you can take it to a editor and edit this letter because the editor can generally make this shine in a way that they retain your meaning but improve it through more natural idioms and English expressions and make it more academic as well so I want to show you what we do I've shown this essay and the SOP webinar that we played last week and but it's the the same idea for any sort of admissions essay this is about the length of a letter of recommendation and this is generally about how much editing you can see so even if you're even if there's no grammar errors you your editor can if they're good which hours are at word vise your editor can generally take your basic sentences and make them into something a little stronger and maybe more natural and that really show the warmth and the feeling that you have for your students but but elevate the language quite a bit and if you want to revisit this video of course you're free to at any time but we have a lot of resources on our our academic resources page about writing specific types of admissions documents from personal statements to letters of recommendation to statement of purpose and MBA admissions essays so once again thank you for attending our admissions webinar and we are going to be having a Q&A session about this one week from today as well so please check our admissions resource blog post about this webinar and you'll see updates for when that will be and if you have any questions or comments or anything you'd like to know after this any burning questions please leave your questions in the comments and as always happy writing