Do my LORs need to be from a professor I took a class with?

Graduate School
1

<p>Hey everyone,
I am a sophomore at Northeastern University, College of Professional Studies pursuing my BA in Health Management, and I'm taking all of my classes online (long story, due to illness). I have mapped out some plans for myself, including applying for a summer health-related research opportunity at Rutgers University. I read an article today talking about the importance of grad school reccs, and I was hoping that conducting research under professors at Rutgers and some other future internships could help me build relationships with professors for recommendations when/if I decide to go to grad school to pursue my MPH.</p>

<p>My question is, would my reccs be weak if I conducted research/worked with the professors that could write my reccs for me, but did not take a class with them?</p>

<p>My question comes from having read this section of the article "10 tips for Thinking About Graduate School (<a href="http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/professors-guide/2009/10/21/10-steps-for-thinking-about-graduate-school)"&gt;http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/professors-guide/2009/10/21/10-steps-for-thinking-about-graduate-school)&lt;/a&gt;." </p>

<p>"You can also run into problems if you lack a letter from a key person in your department. It's a red flag in many grad schools if you're interested in a particular subfield and don't have a letter from the faculty member in that field at your college. So, plan ahead. When picking courses, think about building up the contacts that will net you the three strong letters you need for grad school.</p>

2

<p>You want your letters to come from people who know you as a researcher. In your case, since you know your professors only through online study, you’d be better off with letters outside of your undergraduate institution.</p>

<p>But I’m confused. I can’t imagine that you’d be able to get more than one letter from a summer research experience. You’ll probably have to do a combination of Northeastern and Rutgers letters.</p>

3

<p>That’s the conclusion I came to as well. The summer research internship is called “Project Learn” and it also requires participants to work as a researcher at Rutgers in the following school year, so I think there’s a chance I might be conducting research under someone else. I can’t imagine that my Northeastern professors can say much about me other than I got an “A” and participated on the discussion board =\ so I think I will have to investigate other options.
Thank you for your reply.</p>