<p>my first question is that as two of my professors have asked me to provide them with a draft version of a recommendation letter (!), what do you think about it ? i mean do uthink it would help or worsen things ? specially noting that i have to write probably "2" different draft versions for two professors which is extremely difficult 4 me. can someone help me out of this ? any suggestions ?</p>
<p>another question, my background is totally engineering, Bs in electrical Eng and Ms in Biomedical eng (bio-electrics), now that i'm applying to a Computational neuroscience program, do u think it would be better to request one of the letters from my medical school advisor which was not so involved in details and computational approaches or it would be better to request all of them from the engineering department ?</p>
<p>thank so much in advance to your kind responses.</p>
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now that i'm applying to a Computational neuroscience program, do u think it would be better to request one of the letters from my medical school advisor which was not so involved in details and computational approaches or it would be better to request all of them from the engineering department ?
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<p>Go with whichever profs will give you the strongest recommendations, as long as you've got some sort of science or engineering in there. Comp neuro is one of the most background-flexible fields around. People come into it from all over the frickin' place, and so they are used to recommendations from profs in all sorts of random sci/eng fields. I would, however, say that you want at least one rec from your most recent program, otherwise they will wonder why you don't have one.</p>
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my first question is that as two of my professors have asked me to provide them with a draft version of a recommendation letter (!), what do you think about it ?
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<p>I had to do this the first time I applied to grad programs (though in my case, it was because the recommender's first language wasn't English and he wasn't really sure what US grad programs would want). I think it hurt, because it's hard to pull off without sounding stilted, and because a student generally doesn't know what makes a recommendation look good to a reviewing prof as well as other profs do, but on the other hand, at least you know the rec won't be negative. By the next time I needed a rec from the same person, he had learned more about how to write recs, and the rec he wrote (which he let me see without any request or expectation from me) was much better than anything I would have drafted.</p>
<p>Wow, that's a tough one if two professors asked you to write for each of them. I would draft ONE, and only ONE, and explain to the professor that there's another professor who made a similar request and that you are producing the same letter for each of them, and that they should do significant revisions to create more unique LORs.</p>
<p>I'd probably go find different profs to do the LORs. Most programs only require 2-3 LORs and, if you've done a good job networking in the dept as an UG (and then a grad student), you should have a good 4-8 profs you've worked with, taken a few classes from, etc., who know you well enough to brag about you effectively. When I asked for LORs, I chose my recommenders strategically and then assigned them to each school (I used a pool of 5 writers and am applying to 12 schools, so each prof is writing about 7 LORs). Also, using that kind of strategy, if you needed to use letters from those 2 profs, you could always "assign" them to different schools.</p>
<p>Also, you could try just giving the prof material to work with and tell him/her you don't feel comfortable writing the letter about yourself b/c [you feel] it would be dishonest (or something along those lines). Instead, give the prof such things as a summary of the program (make a 2-5 page summary of what makes that program great and/or unique as well as stating who your POIs are there and highlight any parts that are especially important to your graduate and career goals), a copy of your statement of purpose (for at least 1 school if they're similar; for all schools if very different), (unofficial) transcripts for all colleges attended, summary of activities while in school (relevant to interest), summary and grades of classes taken w/ that prof, etc.</p>