2 very strong LORs, one outlier? How would adcoms view this?

<p>I am fairly confident that I will receive 2 glowing letters. My 3rd recommender, which is the prof. I am currently working with, may be a wildcard. I did ask her if she was comfortable writing me a strong LOR. She said yes, but based on my experiences with her and from some of her other graduate students (a few quit/switched advisers and she's only an assistant prof. so that was ~40% of her grad students), I am not too confident like with the others that she will write me a strong LOR.
I won't go in to the details, but I get the hunch that she will downplay some of my accomplishments. She's also not very happy about me wanting to go elsewhere.</p>

<p>My question is how would 2 very strong LORs, and one maybe mediocre(not bad hopefully) look to an adcom? </p>

<p>I know some of you may suggest that I get a 3rd LOR from someone else, but I can't because:
1) Her lab was the main lab I worked at for the past year
2) It would look bad if I mentioned the experience without an LOR
3) I'm not saying she won't write me a strong LOR, I'm just saying I'm not nearly as confident as my other 2 LORs. So for all I know, she could write me a strong one. It's a worst case scenario that I don't think will happen.</p>

<p>My counter question to you is - why would you ask someone to write you an LoR if you thought it would be mediocre? If you aren’t sure, then you need to ask her explicitly if she can write you a <em>strong</em> letter of recommendation to graduate school, and if her desire to keep you in her lab is going to interfere with her ability to write you a letter. If she said she is, then she is. You don’t explain why she would downplay your accomplishments other than that she may want to keep you, but in my experience professors rarely do this. They find other ways to keep good students around.</p>

<p>How would it look? It would look like 2 strong LoRs and one mediocre one. Which is obviously not as good as 3 strong ones. Will you get in? It depends on your other credentials and the credentials of the other people in the application pool.</p>

<p>I stated in my OP that I asked if it would be strong and she said yes. I said “mediocre” would be a worst case scenario. She is also foreign and new (non-tenured). I am almost positive that this’ll be the first LOR she writes for a student going to grad school. Her definition of strong may be different. I’ve heard of other students having this problem: where the prof. says the letter will be strong, but ends up writing a 2 sentence LOR.</p>

<p>There’s no way I’m going to ask if whether I’m leaving the lab will affect the LOR. This’ll be offensive.
There’s another undergrad working in the lab. He’s staying for grad school. There’s a clear distinction between how we are treated (i.e she doesn’t want to spend as much talking to me as him), but this is understandable since he’ll be her graduate student, and I won’t. </p>

<p>Like I said, this is a worst case scenario and I’m concerned with how an adcom might view this, not a detailed analysis and description of the said professor.</p>

<p>I think you’re overthinking this. If you’ve already asked her, then you have to trust that she’s actually going to write you a strong letter of recommendation like she said she will. Any professor knows that a 2-sentence letter is not going to cut it for graduate school. She may be new, but most professors when doing something for the first time manage to jump over that hurdle. The first time I was asked to write a letter of recommendation, I looked up some samples online and formed mine around that template. My student got into what she was asking me for. Same thing with the med school recommendation I wrote last year. Professors are pretty good at teaching themselves to do things.</p>

<p>There’s no way to answer that question, is what I’m saying…different admissions committees will look at it in different ways. It also depends on the contents of the other two letters, and whether you have research experience with the other professors or not. If the other two professors you’ve only taken class with and this one is the only one you have RA experience, it could potentially be interpreted that you’re good at classes but not so good at research. Or not. It could be interpreted that this one professor doesn’t like you very much, and you didn’t realize that when you asked her. Or that you don’t know her very well and she didn’t have the heart to tell you she wouldn’t wrote you a letter. Or a lot of other things. It depends on the way the letter is written in comparison to the other two letters and to the rest of your application package.</p>

<p>But since she already said she could write you a strong letter, and you have no reason to believe that she won’t, I think it’s something you can safely stop dwelling upon.</p>