brown professor对于RL的一些看法
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他是对写推荐信的老师来说的，不过作为自己撰写推荐信的，我觉得我们也可以认真看看， 比如某些就说的非常赞。
Why Letters Matter
Does anyone read the letters at all? We do, rigorously, sometimes as carefully as we read a research paper: pen in hand, circling comments, annotating margins, noting what the letter did and didn't say.
In fact, letters are so important, even a bad transcript can be offset by them. I know a student who got into a fine graduate program with just a 2.67 GPA. This is because his 2.67 was special: he aced hard classes and got bored in easy ones. His letters presumably said so, and illustrated this with several anecdotes. So, not every 2.67 is equal, and your student's may be of just the right kind; but we won't know that without your letter.
Reporting on Research
At a highly-competitive university like Brown, we want to know the student's research potential. The best assessment of this is what they have already done. If you are their research advisor, you have a special obligation to them (and to us) in your letter:
describe their work in your own words
tell us what the student's contribution was
tell us whether it succeeded or failed
if it's ongoing, tell us why you think it will succeed
We rarely expect the ideas to have originated from the student, but we would like to see signs that they took ownership of the project, improved it in some way, refined the idea, and so on. Finally:
put any publications in context
Students don't always know how to do this. If you published a paper on the work, tell us about the quality of the venue. In particular, students are poor at telling different kinds of publications apart (tech report from conference poster from research paper) and may even try to hide the distinction (I've seen this happen). Help us understand what they really accomplished.
If you run a summer research center, you may get bombarded with letter requests from each of your students. I have seen such people write perfunctory one-paragraph letters. These hurt students, and are ultimately unethical. Someone gave you money to run that center; when you asked for it, you took on an obligation. Fulfill it, or else get out of the way. There are plenty of others who will gladly put that money to better use.
完整的帖子在附件里~
希望对大家有帮助{:6_143:}
Why Letters Matter
Does anyone read the letters at all? We do, rigorously, sometimes as carefully as we read a research paper: pen in hand, circling comments, annotating margins, noting what the letter did and didn't say.
In fact, letters are so important, even a bad transcript can be offset by them. I know a student who got into a fine graduate program with just a 2.67 GPA. This is because his 2.67 was special: he aced hard classes and got bored in easy ones. His letters presumably said so, and illustrated this with several anecdotes. So, not every 2.67 is equal, and your student's may be of just the right kind; but we won't know that without your letter.
Reporting on Research
At a highly-competitive university like Brown, we want to know the student's research potential. The best assessment of this is what they have already done. If you are their research advisor, you have a special obligation to them (and to us) in your letter:
describe their work in your own words
tell us what the student's contribution was
tell us whether it succeeded or failed
if it's ongoing, tell us why you think it will succeed
We rarely expect the ideas to have originated from the student, but we would like to see signs that they took ownership of the project, improved it in some way, refined the idea, and so on. Finally:
put any publications in context
Students don't always know how to do this. If you published a paper on the work, tell us about the quality of the venue. In particular, students are poor at telling different kinds of publications apart (tech report from conference poster from research paper) and may even try to hide the distinction (I've seen this happen). Help us understand what they really accomplished.
If you run a summer research center, you may get bombarded with letter requests from each of your students. I have seen such people write perfunctory one-paragraph letters. These hurt students, and are ultimately unethical. Someone gave you money to run that center; when you asked for it, you took on an obligation. Fulfill it, or else get out of the way. There are plenty of others who will gladly put that money to better use.
完整的帖子在附件里~
希望对大家有帮助{:6_143:}
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