Our Recs for Your Recs

(upbeat music) - Welcome back to Navigating Law School Admissions with Miriam and Kristi. I'm Miriam, the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Yale Law School. And of course, I'm joined by Kristi Jobson, the Dean of Admissions at Harvard Law School. - That's me. - This week's topic, Letters of Recommendation. - This component of your application might feel like it's completely out of your hands. Someone else writes your letter, and you typically wave your right to ever see it. But even though you're not writing your own recommendation letters and to be clear, you should never be writing your own recommendation letters. There's actually a lot you can control to make sure that your letters help strengthen your application as much as possible. - And that's our discussion topic for today's episode. But first, as usual, it's time for a game. So what have we got teed up today, Kristi? Since Letters of Recommendation are sometimes referred to as LORs, I thought we might play with the alphabetical abbreviation and play the ABCs of LORs. You remember long car trips as a kid. - And with kids, I have one coming up in a few weeks, I'm kind of dreading it. - Well, you might enjoy this game. In the ABC game, players agree upon a category. The first player states a phrase that fits into that category beginning with any letter she chooses. The next player must state a phrase that begins with the last letter of the previous word or phrase. - Okay, I got it. I've done this before. And I'm assuming the category is Letters of Recommendation, not to state the obvious. - Ding-ding-ding-ding-bingo. (laughs) - All right, I think we can do this. All right, who's going for a smear you? - You're up, I'm up. Okay, all right, let me think of a good one to start. All right, here we go. Big names don't matter. Recommendations are best when there are anecdotes. - Oh gosh, that should be easy. Ugh, start asking for letters early. You should never, ever ask a high school teacher. - Yeah, you should never ask a high school teacher. You should also focus your letters on academic references. - Wait, wait, wait, wait, teacher ends with R. - Oh, did I just screw up and lose? I think you're totally dead, you beat me. I think you just had the upper hand throw of that whole game. - I give it a big win. - Let's get to today's discussion. Now ever since Christy crushed me at the game, to say we're devoting an entire episode to an important, but sometimes perhaps overlook component of applications, letters of recommendation. - And we mean overlooks by applicants, not admissions committees. - That's right. Letters of recommendation are an incredibly important part of the application to everyone who's reading those applications. - All right, so let's start with some nuts and bolts and then we'll move into some advice. So let's say most schools require two letters of recommendation, but we'll accept a third and sometimes even a fourth. - How many letters do you accept? - We accept three through LSAC. - See, that's interesting. We accept up to four, two are required and then we'll accept up to four. Letters are processed and sent to schools through the Law School Admission Council website. You can look at the directions online, but basically you enter your recommender's contact information in your LSAC account and that generates a request for them to submit a letter. Your recommender submits the letter directly through the LSAC portal. You don't upload it for them. You're somewhat uninvolved in the process. And typically an applicant waives the right to review the letter. - And you really do need to waive your right to review the letter. It would be, to me, at least a pretty major red flag if an applicant didn't do so. - So at Harvard Law School, and I think most schools, we strongly recommend that at least one of your letters come from an academic reference. - Yeah, and at Yale, we recommend that two letters come from academic references. And that's because our review process is very driven by faculty readers and they really like to hear from faculty members. I'll start with some general thoughts on letters of recommendation. I think it's important to begin by thinking about what your goals are when you start to think about who's going to write those letters. So obviously you want the admissions committee to understand who you are both as a student and as a person and as a community member within an academic community. So what are you gonna bring to the classroom? What are you going to bring to that academic community? So letters of recommendation are best when they can help us see beyond the transcript to what the actual experience was of having you in the classroom and outside of the classroom as well. - It might be interesting to just speak to how we as admissions officers use letters of recommendation and Miriam, I think it's just as you say, I use letters to help me picture the applicant. A transcript and test scores might tell me whether the applicant can handle the workload at Harvard Law School or in law school, but the letters really bring it home for an applicant. It helps the applicant come to life for the reader. - Yeah, I mean, we can definitely just look at the transcript and see if you got an A or a minus in whatever course is on your transcript. But the recommender can really describe how you spoke in class, what kind of observations you were making or whether you spoke in class at all, how you engage with your classmates, were you respectful and really listened and helped other people open up, were you the first person to speak or were you someone who kind of sat back and thoughtfully listened to others before you engage in the classroom. And what was sort of the quality of your contributions to that classroom discussion? Did you come to office hours and why were you coming to office hours? Was it to sort of quibble over grades? Or was it because you were really eager to get additional readings and to ask questions because you were just really excited by the topic of the class and wanted to learn more? So those kinds of comments can really give a lot of added depth to just a simple grade on a transcript. - Agreed, and the recommendation letters can also help the reader understand the transcript and one's academic path a bit more. I know I really rely on recommenders to provide insight to the rigorer of an applicant's coursework and course selection. Recommenders will often highlight graduate courses or upper level courses or particularly difficult and rigorous classes. It's also really helpful to run a recommender can tell us as readers more about some of the unique features of your academic program. So for example, it's much, much more credible and effective when a recommender tells us that your major is the hardest one at your school, then when you include that in an addendum. If you included an addendum, it kind of sounds like you're complaining. If your recommender says it, it sounds like a pretty major compliment that you were in a challenging major and hopefully did really well in it. - I'll share an example. I remember a letter from last year that clarified that the applicant was one of only a half dozen students invited to participate in this intensive honors colloquium in his major. And I was out of 200 that had applied. And I noticed the honors colloquium designation on the transcript, of course. And I believe it was on the applicant's resume as well. But that recommender provided a little more context as to just how selective that program was. - Yeah, I mean, that's a great example. And this is something you can help your recommender do. You can say to them, would you mind describing that my major is really hard or it's a selective major that has an application process or that this honor that I got was one that you had to apply for. And I was one of only five people out of 200. You can really prompt them to explain those things for us and say, you know, if you don't explain it, I don't think they'll understand. And most recommenders I think are very happy to do that. - Miriam, I have a colleague at HLS who always reads the letters of recommendation first when he picks up a file. That's the first thing he does. And I have another colleague who just swears by finishing up the file read with the letters of recommendation. I was curious, do you have a particular practice or habit? I usually find that I read the letters immediately after reviewing the transcript. So I read them last, which is actually right after I read the transcript, but I have a colleague who reads them either first or last, depending on whether it's initial read or re-review. So if he's reading it on initial read, he reads them one way. And then if I asked him to re-review a file that I want his opinion on, he does it the other way. So even for him, it depends a little bit on what part of the process it is. So yeah, I always think that's kind of funny. - We all have our habits. - Yes, yeah, we definitely do. You kind of get into that mindset. - All right, so let's get back to what applicants can do. So I think the most common question, at least that I get, and you probably get this a lot too, about the letters of rec, is the who question? Who's applicants be asking to write letters of recommendation, which I think is a great and very important question? - It is, I mean, it's sort of the key threshold question for you. In short, I'd say someone who knows you well, and ideally someone who has seen you in more than one setting. So it could be a professor who's taught you in multiple classes, someone who served as both an instructor and an advisor on your research, a teaching assistant who knew you well both through the small group section and through interactions in office hours. Someone who is a mentor, maybe someone who has gotten to know you through an extracurricular setting or your advocacy or leadership on campus, as well as your academics. - Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think the advice I give depends a little bit on where people are in their academic career. So someone who's a freshman or a sophomore, maybe even a junior, I'll often say, think ahead, who are those people you've started to develop relationships with, and can you deepen those relationships? Can you take a second class? Can you maybe start going to office hours a little more? For someone who is done with college or as a senior, it's really looking back to kind of think about who you have those relationships with. And also I just wanna say to a Swage Anxiety, we get that there are schools, which are very large schools, where it's harder to develop those kinds of relationships. And that's totally okay. We do get that those relationships are easier in some places and harder in other places. So don't worry about that either. - Sometimes even different departments within the same school might have different structures for the coursework, the number of larger classes you're expected to take in your first couple of years in college and different expectations for interactions with faculty versus graduate teaching assistants. - Can I ask you a question and I say this 'cause I faced this question when I was in school. So I was a STEM major and I was a little freaked out because all of my closest relationships were with my chem professor or my bio professor who I was writing a thesis with, but I was worried about getting all my letters from them because it's such a different type of classwork. What do you advise people who are in a similar situation? I go back to the touchstone. If those are the people who know you best, I would trust that they have positive things to say about you, about your intellectual engagement, about your level of curiosity, how you approach problems. And I personally don't get particularly hung up on whether or not the person knows you predominantly through lab work and through more STEM-based courses versus a large giant paper in a history department. - Yeah. I agree, except I will say that if you're like me and you also kind of minored and I was a classics minor, so I did have some humanities work, it can be nice to throw that into. I would say consider also whether there's someone who's worked with you over time, someone who's seen you wrestle with setbacks and grow. That could be academic, that could be professional, even potentially some personal challenges. So for example, when someone wrote a senior thesis or engaged in a major research project that took a good number of months or multiple semesters, I find that the individual's advisor typically writes a really strong letter. - Yeah. - That tends to be a very strong and really interesting letter to read. All right, I want to bust a myth. No one is impressed by someone's, if someone fancy signs your letter. And I've seen letters from presidents, I've seen letters from Supreme Court sentences. And those letters are only impressive if the things that they are saying about you are meaningful things about you. You have to make the depth of the relationship and your experiences with the person and their experiences with you, the touchstone of whether they should be asked. - I totally agree. Personally, I'd rather see a thoughtful detailed letter from a PhD candidate who's a teaching assistant, then a brief somewhat, terse straightforward note from the fancy chair of the department who's won a poll surprise. I've heard one of our colleagues in admissions describe this rule as substance oversignature, which I think captures it nicely. So Miriam, you bust a myth. I will offer a hot take and I said it in the game, never submit a recommendation from a high school teacher. - Yeah, that's not even a hot take. That's what-- - Never. That's like an absolute SMH. Never, never, never. - Miriam applicants sometimes ask about the overall package of recommendations with two or three or maybe four letters. Some wonder if there's an ideal makeup, all academic, two academic and one professional, all professional, where do you land? - So I think the answer, at least for Yale Law School and this may be school-specific. So I do think you should look at other schools, but for Yale, it is very clear. We want two academic letters. That should be your starting point for us. What about it, Harvard? - So we again strongly recommend that at least one come from an academic source, however, we also elaborate and say that if at all possible, two of your letters should come from people who knew you in an academic setting. And honestly, unless someone is many, many years out of school, it's surprising to see only one academic letter of recommendation and can give me some pause. - Yeah, I will say like I said it very cleanly, but I want to also always decrease anxiety. We get it. If you're out of school for a long time, you may not be able to get two academic letters. We admit plenty of people in that situation and that's okay. But I want to set the goal and then say that we understand that not everyone can meet it and that's all right. - Miriam, I'll throw out a question that I've been asked quite a few times. Why do admissions committees focus so much on academic letters of recommendation? So I'll answer this generally and then say specifically for us. So at the end of the day, we are evaluating you for an academic program. So people who've experienced you as a student or in other kinds of academic settings have the most to say about how you're gonna be as a law student. They just have that personal experience. It's for that same reason that we say that if you are getting professional letters, they should be speaking about skills that are similar to academic skills, like critical thinking, research and writing type skills. I'd yell specifically because our faculty read the most successful files. That's who they find most credible to speak about those kinds of skills as well. Are people who are fellow faculty members or fellow teachers? - So another common question. Who should you select as a third recommender, assuming of course that an applicant chooses to submit a third letter of recommendation? - I think that begs another question. That's which is, should you be submitting that third recommendation letter in the first place? You really, really, really don't have to. I do not open a file and expect to see three letters or four letters. So I think you should really be thinking first about is more worth it before you get to the question of who that should be. I mean, where do you land on that? - I also do not open a file and expect to see three letters. At HLSA, I think in our application forum, we phrase it something along the lines of two recommenders carefully chosen are likely to present a stronger case for you than three recommenders. If even one of those three offers a more tepid recommendation for you. - It's such a downer when you read two good ones and then you get to the third one and it's like, "Wah, wah, wah." It just, it doesn't take away, but it just leaves you on such a sour note. - It sort of dilutes it, it dilutes the impact. - Yeah, it really does. And it definitely sucks when that third one says something kind of not great. And you're like, "Oh, they just stopped while they were ahead." - I was like, "If they were on a roll." - Yep, yep, that's right. So anyways, you should submit that third letter if you think that that individual is gonna have something to say that's additive. Something that's different, something that's unique. You know, often that can be an employer if you've been working for a while and you think they're gonna add something really different from what your academic recommenders are gonna say. Is that sort of what you're seeing? - That's very typical. A third recommendation from a professional reference who offers some insight into an applicant's interest and path to law school. Yeah, there's someone from outside your major. You're gonna get two from your major and one from outside your major. That's a good combo. All right, so that gets us to another topic. Let's say you've done your best. You've tried for two academic letters, but you just, you can't for reasonable reasons. What do you do then? What kinds of non-academic letters professional, personal, are valuable? What should they be focusing on? - I'll start with professional letters. So for those wondering, what is a professional letter? - Exactly, these are recommenders who've worked with you in a professional setting. It could be a supervisor at a summer internship. It could be your manager at work. Someone who can tell us what it's like to have you as a colleague. For me, professional recommendations are most helpful when they speak to skills that translate to an academic context. So for example, a professional recommender could discuss your written work product, presentation skills, ability to participate in productive discussions. - Yeah, I always think about it in terms of translatable skills. So certain professional skills are very translatable to the classroom and some aren't. So I would frame this to your recommenders that they should focus on those skills that are those translatable skills. I mean, Kristi, what do you think when you see professional recommendations from peers or colleagues rather than supervisors? Do you feel good or bad or neutral? - Every once in a while it works. One just popped into my head. It was someone who was a co-founder of a startup. They didn't have a manager. - Really? - Really? - But that one of their co-founders spoke in a way I found quite impactful about the process of working with them. In some ways it reminded me of learning more about what someone's like in an academic group setting. I don't want to say it's a total ban. Every once in a while it works. That was a really specific setting. If you are a paralegal at a law firm and one of your fellow paralegals writes for you, I'm not sure why. - Better to leave it out. - All right, what about the purely personal recommendation? - I feel more strongly about this. For me, purely personal recommendations are almost never valuable. - Yeah, I mean, I find them often sort of like the high school teacher just showing bad judgment. And therefore not always, not disqualifying necessarily, but really just detracting from the many positive things in an application. - I've read a fair amount of recommendations from longtime family friends. And it's like they can't resist the urge to tell us about anecdotes about middle school soccer. Rule of thumb just avoid the recommendation from a family friend who has never worked with you in an academic or professional context. Even if they're a lawyer, even if they went to one of our law schools. - Yeah, they can be really well-meaning and they can sometimes, in fact, always you say that you're a really lovely person, but it just doesn't add value. All right, one other question I often get asked is whether it helps to have a letter from a YLS alum. My answer to that is always, maybe, an alum for a lumpsake is certainly not necessary by any stretch of the imagination, most applicants, including most successful applicants do not have that. But I guess it can be helpful. It's primarily helpful if they're already a good recommender for you. And then they can add into their letter why they think that you would be specifically strong because they know our community so well and they think you would fit into it. So if you're choosing between two recommenders and one of them happens to be an alum, to me, that would be a good reason to pick them over the other. - Sometimes those letters from alumni connections can feel a little forced to me if there's not substance there. And I agree with you, I'd go with the toss up. If you're between two people who know you really well, one happened to go to a certain school you're thinking about maybe that's your tiebreaker. So echoing back to our last episode on timing, when should you ask a recommender to write for you? - All right, as someone who briefly taught and got asked for recommendation letters, please give them some time. I think good recommenders, at least when I did it, it took me forever to write a recommendation letter. I really tried to make them really personal and specific and say nice things about the people I was writing for and that does take time and sometimes multiple drafts. So you wanna make sure they don't feel rushed so they can do the best possible job. - Oh, I completely agree. There's an art to writing a good recommendation. You wanna give people plenty of time. And personally, I feel like I can tell when a recommendation has been rushed and sometimes a recommender will even share that the applicant waited until the last minute to ask. - Yeah, that's not good. And sometimes it's the opposite. They'll be like, oh, this person was so great. They came to me so early and they were so helpful and you can really appreciate it and we appreciate it when you've been that kind of organized, helpful person. The other thing I always tell people to, don't wait because you're stressed about asking. You should never feel badly about asking a faculty member to write a letter of recommendation. It truly is part of their job to write them. Of course, you have to be respectful. Give them plenty of lead time, but do not view it as asking them for a favor. I do feel pretty strongly about that as well. - So you've given your recommenders plenty of time. How else can you help? How can an applicant help their recommenders advocate for their application? - So depending on where you are with the application, you can definitely share some of your application materials with them, like a draft of a personal statement. For example, although be careful, because once in a while you'll share a draft and they'll talk about it and then you'll completely rewrite the personal statement. - Oh yes! - That's always so weird. - Oh, they clearly want to go to law school because their dad have this medical issue and they're really focused on health law. And I'll be like, what? That's not what I didn't know that. And it's always really awkward. So make sure you're pretty set on the draft before you share it. - I have one flip of that. So we were talking early about the letter. I always read it right after transcripts and then before the personal statement. And sometimes the recommender, it's like spoiler alert or something. They share, they sometimes even summarize the personal statement and sometimes it's quite moving. And then I get to the personal statements a little bit of a deja vu and it deflates the impact a little bit. - So give them your personal statement if it's ready. Maybe offered to go for coffee when we're in a world where we can go for coffee again or have a chat over Zoom or on phone. So you can tell them a little bit more about why you're going to law school, what you're hoping to get out of it. I'm definitely sure a resume as well. I think if you were a student in their class, please remind them what classes you're in. Maybe what grades you got. Maybe send back to them the papers. You have the paper with their markup of it so that they don't have to dig through their files to try to find that stuff. I think that can be helpful. All right, so we've covered advice for you as you're kind of seeking out your recommenders. So what advice would we give to the recommenders themselves? And maybe you can pass a lot on some of these steps. All right, what have you got, Kristi, for the recommenders? I really appreciate when a recommendation showcases growth. So responding to a disappointing grade on a midterm or a paper by coming to weekly office hours, requesting additional reading, discussing concepts further. I love the growth trajectories and recommendations. I like, and I think we've touched on this before, I like when letters really talk about how someone loves learning. How they're willing for the sake of being a student. They're in class and really not afraid to get questions wrong, really seem to be caring about the material for the sake of really mastering it. And coming to office hours not, you know, not because they care so much about the grade, but because they really want to learn deeply. And that always really impresses me. What's your take on letters that incorporate commentary from another individual? So I have seen this with professional letters, but I've seen it more commonly with a professor and a teaching assistant from a course. The professor writes and signs the letter, but incorporates sometimes in a big block quote commentary from the teaching assistant. Honestly, I have kind of mixed feelings about this. If the primary letter writer is saying things independently and they have lots of great things to say about you independently, it's kind of like a two for the price of one. You get what they're saying plus what they're quoting. But if they don't have anything independent to say and it's just the quote, I'm always in my mind thinking, well, why didn't you just get that other person to write the letter? So I think that can be a tricky line to police. Yeah, I've seen, Miriam was a student in XYZ course. She got an A, I didn't know her well. So I am passing the rest of this letter off to a TA to provide insight signed professor. Yeah, and I'm kind of like, could it should have just got the TA to write it? They probably would have done a better letter than the professor did. So another piece of advice resist, and this is for recommenders, resist the urge to fill space with information from a student's resume with a recap of the personal statement, trust that we've reviewed all those other materials. If you want to comment on the depth of community involvement, campus involvement, you can keep it general, offer an anecdote or story that showcases leadership, an anecdote or story that's your own, but those sort of basic facts, we've got them. Oh my God, that is such a pet peeve of mine. I hate those ones that are just resume recaps. I'm like, I read it, I'm done, don't do it again for me. It makes me bananas. The other thing I hate is that generic paragraph, which so many have, that's just a description of the course. Sometimes it's multiple paragraphs. Oh yeah. Let me tell you like the cut and paste from the course catalog about the three courses that they took with me. And I'm like, oh God, I know what intro to philosophy is. I don't need a paragraph describing it. Please, thank you. Pass it onto your recommenders. Save us, save my eyes from reading those. One thing that recommenders do that I actually find really helpful is they'll kind of put a number on it. They'll say this applicant is in the top, x%, 1%, 2%, 5%, of all the students that I've ever taught or of all the students I'm writing for this year. What do you think about that, that metric, Christie? It's certainly compelling. As is phrasing that doesn't use a number, but says this is one of the most intellectually engaged students I've ever worked with. Sometimes you'll even get one of the top two or three people in my 30-year career, I actually find that very compelling. Yeah, I mean, that's a wow, right? Like that as a reader, wow. One of the top three in a 45-year career. There is a dark side, though, when people say that every student is in the top 1% of students that they've worked with, I don't buy it. And here's my biggest piece of recommendation for recommenders. If you can't write a strong letter for an applicant, just say no, just politely decline. The applicant will move on to someone who can. And applicants, if you're getting that hint from your recommender, just move on. Sometimes I'll see a letter where the person's like, I told them I couldn't write a strong letter and they didn't move on and so here we are. So take the hint, too. All right, it's time for some Q&A. All right, let's do it. And for full disclosure, I solicited these questions about letters of recommendation from the HLS admissions Instagram story. - I'm so impressed you have Instagram, so ahead of the game on all the social media. - I love the gram, I don't even know what that is. All right, first question. Do law schools care about how recently an applicant had a recommender as a professor? - In terms of the number of years that have passed since they taught the person, I don't really care. The years are what they are, right? So if someone supervised a big academic project you did junior year of college and you've worked for six years since college, that's what it is. I think the academic work still stands as it was. And so I personally don't care, but here's one nuance. Miriam, I'll flip it to you. What is your reaction when you see a letter of recommendation from a professor who taught the applicant during freshman year, maybe sophomore fall? - So I think it's often not the greatest. Once in a while it works and it's okay, but if that was the applicant's only interaction with that faculty members, so let's say they had a seminar with them freshman spring and no ongoing relationship, I'm always a little wondering why? Why did they choose that person? Sometimes there are good reasons, sometimes there aren't. I would be thoughtful before you choose someone from very, very early in your college career unless there's an ongoing relationship. - And here's our next question. - Hi, Miriam and Kristi, my name's Ancia, and I'm a third year undergrad student at UC Berkeley. - Thank you so much for doing this podcast. It's been really helpful and informative. My question for both of you is, how do you suggest creating a relationship with your teachers besides getting a good grade in their specific class in order to ask them for letters of recommendation, especially if it's hard for you to connect with teachers on a personal level? - Thank you so much for your awesome question. So here are a couple of thoughts on ways that you can try and develop those relationships with your professors. So office hours are often a key to developing those relationships. If you find it a little intimidating or you get a little nervous, one thing you can do is try to bring a friend from class along which can make it feel a little bit less nerve-wracking. Also, maybe try to think of a few questions in advance so you don't get there and totally have brain-free is. You can even write them down so you know what you're gonna ask about. The kinds of things you might wanna ask about are obviously the course material itself. Maybe do some of the optional readings and ask about it, ask for some additional readings or if you have some questions that didn't come up during class, you can ask them there. The other big topic maybe to think about asking about is scholarship. So if there's a paper that you're potentially interested in writing that relates to the topic of class or their scholarship, that's great, or you can always ask about their scholarship. Professors love to talk about their scholarship. So maybe read a paper they wrote or an article they wrote and then ask some questions about it. You can always do this over email too. So if you find a newspaper article or you hear something online that might be related to the professor scholarship or to the coursework, feel free just to send it to them and say hey, this made me think of you. This made me think of our class together and I thought it might be of interest. If your department hosts events, either social events or speaker events, try to go to those. That can be a really nice way to get a chance to talk to people in a less formal context and that can be a nice way to develop that relationship as well. Also over the long term, maybe try to take a second class with the same professor, offer to be an RA or a TA if they're looking for someone working a lab. If you're going to be writing a thesis, that's a great way to develop a relationship as well or try to write a bigger paper with that professor. All right, finally, do you read applicants need to submit new letters? - No, typically not. You should check yourself about, you should ask yourself all this questions we've discussed in this podcast. Did I ask people who knew me really well? Did I ask people who I feel confident spoke to my academic potential? If you think you already submitted the strongest case for you through those letters of recommendation, I would focus on tuning up your resume, enhancing your experiences. I would definitely write a new personal statement, but I don't think you strictly need to submit new letters of recommendation. And that's a wrap for our third episode of Navigating Law School Admissions with Miriam and Christie. What questions are on your mind? Send them along to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. And please put the word podcast in the subject line. You can write your question in the email or for extra fun, attach your questions of voice recording and we will play it on our show. As always, thanks for listening. This podcast is produced by Ryan McAvoy from the Yale Broadcast Studio.