<p>I will be going into my junior year and will be applying for grad school in Fall 2014. </p>
<p>I'm not quite sure how to get good letters of recommendations from professors. Like how do you appeal to them so that they would write a good letter for you. At the moment, I can think of 1, maybe 2 professors who will write good letters of recs for me (one of which I work for for undergrad research). I guess I would need 2 letters from professors who have only taught me classes, but I hear a letter from a prof saying you got an A in his/her class is not very helpful.</p>
<p>Do you guys have any advice on how to get good letters of recs from professors other than the ones you're doing your research/work with?</p>
<p>What are they gonna say about me though? “pyroknife got an A in my class, I recommend this dude?” I don’t see what else a professor can say if I only took a class with him. </p>
<p>I’m looking for pointers to “make” professors like me.</p>
<p>Working hard, doing well on labs, having a generally positive attitude, participating in class and having good attendance are all qualities of a good student that I’m sure a professor could appreciate.
If there was a class with a teacher who you really connected with (and you showed it in class), use them. Hopefully you’d get a good grade in their class, but it’s not quite as important. Pedigree is a plus too, if you happen to have any professors who are famous or MIT/Stanford/Harvard/Princeton/Berkeley/etc grads.
Unless you burned bridges all along the way to where you are, you should be able to find someone who would be happy to write favorably about you. If you didn’t do well anywhere or you made every professor so far dislike you, then grad school is probably not for you anyway.</p>
<p>No professor dislikes me, but I don’t think most of the professors “like” me. I may get good grades in there class, but I don’t go to their office hours to get to know them. I will change that this semester.
This is so different from high school, where teachers are more approachable. It seems professors don’t have the time to talk to students or even want to.</p>
<p>If you haven’t been to office hours it would be tough to give an accurate description on if a professor is approachable or not. Personally, I try to stop by a few times a year. Beginning of the class to introduce myself and randoms times during the year for questions or discussion. I am definitely not the type to go to office hours weekly.</p>
<p>My honest suggestion is just find ways to talk to them more whether they seem like they like to talk or not. Go to their office hours so they know your name and have kind of a sense of who you are in addition to your academic achievement. </p>
<p>I look specifically where they graduated from, who they’ve been working with, blah blah. One of the professors I’m taking this fall I’m going to get very buddy buddy with because she did her PhD at the college I want to. You could also ask for advice about applying to graduate schools as a topic to talk about.</p>