Graduate Student Letters of Recommendation

 Note: Any resemblance to real persons living or dead may be a coincidence.

I don’t write letters of recommendation for students who seek a teaching assistantship. I don’t know any student well enough to judge whether he’s "a good fit". What is a good fit anyway? Someone who enjoys an environment of back stabbing, intrigue, and hypocrisy?

Sure, students have grades, but that isn’t the only measure of a student. If all of my colleagues who do write letters of recommendation were to look at students’ Facebook pages and Tik Tok accounts, I’m sure they’d see some things they’d wish they’d known about before they wrote that effusive letter and sealed the envelope.

Apparently, some profs do check students’ online accounts for incriminating photos taken during spring break. I hear about it in the faculty lounge when I run out of coffee in my office and go there to partake of the community swill.

I don’t care if a student got horse faced during spring break and engaged in a group grope and was stupid enough to allow his/her photo to be taken and posted online. That’s youthful recklessness. That’s a stage in life that passes quickly.

Some profs spend too much time doing online searches of their students. One wacko (a long- tenured female prof) developed an obsession for a student and actually stalked him not just online but in real life. Her obsession wasn’t romantic. It was manic preoccupation for finding sordid details about his reputation. It began during the student’s undergraduate studies and persisted through his graduate studies. Fortunately, he didn’t know her, didn’t ask her for a letter of recommendation, and wasn’t aware that she had been stalking him. I wonder what she might have written had he asked for one.

Another prof offers to write letters of recommendation for her male students. What the male student receives from her is a blank piece of university stationary in a university envelope. This came to light after one male student collected not the requisite three letters of recommendation but five. When he received her sealed letter, he held it to a light and saw that nothing was written on the letter and discarded it. He submitted three of the remaining letters with his application pack. When the members of the graduate studies committee opened the students’ application packs, she saw that her letter was not among the student’s letters of recommendation. She acted insulted. Many of us were aware of what she had been doing for years.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this it’s this:

1.  Don’t ask me for a letter of recommendation

2.  Choose your advocates carefully

3.  Get a strong light

4.  Close and delete your Facebook, Tik Tok, and Twitter accounts before you apply for graduate school and an assistantship.