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The details:

1) It is easiest (but not required) for you to establish a recommendation file through the UW Career Services. This costs $35, and the office will send out recommendations for you for 7 years after graduation (or about 20 years if you are earning a teaching certificate).

2) If, after reading the text above, you decide you would like me to write a letter, please provide me with a very short (one sentence) description of the position you are applying for and succinctly list the qualities on which your application will be judged (e.g. #1: grades, #2: community service, #3: research experience…). Tell me briefly what qualities you have that apply to these requirements, and how I might have observed these qualities when you were in my class or laboratory.

If you would like to give me a resume and/or a short description of yourself, that is usually helpful. If you are applying for medical school, please tell me if you are interested in a particular branch of medicine. If you were a student in one of my classes, provide information about which year and quarter you took the class. What is your major and when will you graduate? Will you have a BA or a BS? If you are not a current student, it is often helpful to send a photo of yourself so I can remember who you are. At least 200 students pass through my courses every year. During years that I teach Chem162, the number is significantly higher. Include all of this information and your e-mail address along with your forms rather than in a separate e-mail.

3) I do not write non-confidential letters, so remember to sign the confidential authorization on all of your forms! If you are submitting the letter to the UW Center for Career Services, this means signing the back of the form and giving me a copy of that form. If your form does not include a place to sign for a confidential authorization, please type out “I waive my right to view this confidential recommendation” on a separate piece of paper and sign it for me. I will include it with my letter. I need a piece of paper stating the confidentiality for every single letter I send for you. Confidential recommendations are much stronger than non-confidential ones, and doing this will work in your benefit.

4) I do not write online recommendations. I usually discard e-mail solicitations from universities for recommendations. Until universities (e.g. Harvard) can make online/electronic submissions uniformly less painful than paper submissions, I’ll stick with paper. My primary concern is that online/e-mail recommendation requests dribble in to my mailbox and consume time to track down and deal with individually. In order to not limit the number of students who receive recommendations from me, I need to limit the types of recommendations I provide. Please print out any online forms and give them to me with your other forms so that I can complete all of them at once.

5) Contact me in advance. The probability that I will have time to write a thoughtful letter is proportional to the time I have to write it.

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Source:  OpenStax, 2008 nsf advance workshop: negotiating the ideal faculty position. OpenStax CNX. Feb 24, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10628/1.3
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