<p>I will be applying for engineering grad school this Fall. My concern is that I may not be able to get 3 strong LORs. I am pretty confident one of my LOR writers (mentor from an REU program from another school, I think he's pretty well known in his field) will write a glowing LOR for me. </p>
<p>The other 2 LORs will come from profs from my institution. They will both be from people I have done research with. One will be from a prof I did research with awhile back, but I think it'll be pretty strong. The 3rd one is the one I am concerned about. I will be asking the prof I currently work for for one. I am hoping for a strong letter, but I can also see her writing a mediocre one based on her personality (won't go into too much depth on this), but I don't seem to get a lot of credit for the work I've done. </p>
<p>I am shooting for top schools. Do you guys think having a combination of a glowing, strong, maybe mediocre letter will suffice or would a mediocre letter really bring down my application?</p>
<p>Probably not - very few people genuinely have 3 glowing letters of recommendation. Most have at least one that says “He did well in my class and seems motivated” or some such.</p>
<p>Yes, all three of your recommendations should be strong. NONE of your recommendations should be “mediocre.” There is, of course, a difference between glowing and strong - not all three of your letters need to be “glowing,” but they should all be strong and none should be mediocre.</p>
<p>The reason you don’t want a mediocre letter is because sometimes professors use it in code to talk to other professors. It’s considered unprofessional, and perhaps unethical, to write a negative letter of recommendation for a student. Some professors, though, feel unable to turn down a request for writing a student a letter, even if they don’t feel they can write that letter strongly. So many times to remedy this, they write a lukewarm letter. It’s often a coded way to communicate to their colleagues “I don’t really know/like this student very well/much, but they asked me so here’s a letter.” Sometimes it is a stealth way to communicate that the student themselves is mediocre.</p>
<p>It is, of course, very common for students to have at least one letter writer with whom they’ve only taken 1-2 classes and who doesn’t know them very well. The letter should <em>still</em> be strong and not mediocre. “He did well in my class and seems motivated” is NOT what you want in a recommendation letter, especially if you are applying to very competitive schools. The person who write that third letter shouldn’t just be someone you took for class and never interacted with otherwise; it should be someone you visited in office hours, or discussed questions with, or somehow displayed personally your aptitude for graduate study. They should be someone that can at least say “Despite the fact that Differential Equations was a 200-person lecture, Pyroknife often approached me during office hours and we had long discussions on the nature of quantum mechanics. Through these, I’ve learned that Pyroknife is a bright, intelligent, and thoughtful person with a real passion for aerodynamic theory” or something like that.</p>
<p>So if you think your current professor will write you a mediocre one - and assuming you actually mean “mediocre” and not just “not glowing, but still pretty strong,” - you should find someone else.</p>
<p>+1</p>
<p>People are easily pacified by the thought of having a professor who simply knows their name in a class to write them a letter.</p>