<p>I'm a senior at UCLA, and I'm a little worried here about reference letters. Say you have done 3 years of research (the max for an undergraduate applying straight in), but with two different PIs; ie. 1 yr and 2 yrs, resulting in 2 strong letters of reference. The last letter of reference would have to be sourced from a class, and would basically say, yes my student got an A...</p>
<p>Wouldn't you be at a disadvantage to a student who has done only 2 years of research but with maybe 3 faculty members, and is now able to solicit 3 letters from research PIs?</p>
<p>Before some people bring up the platitude that the quality of your research and faculty name matter blah blah, please assume those things are equivalent, except that now you have 3 big name faculty writing your letter instead of 2.</p>
<p>I honestly think it makes no difference. Two of my LORs are faculty and one is a research engineer. What matters most is what results you achieved during those 3 years (publications perhaps) and state that in your SOP. Just my 2 cents though.</p>
<p>“Wouldn’t you be at a disadvantage to a student who has done only 2 years of research but with maybe 3 faculty members, and is now able to solicit 3 letters from research PIs?”</p>
<p>No. If you’ve worked with three PI’s in two years, you probably haven’t had time to do really good work with any of them— I think an admissions committee would be very skeptical… of course, if you have three big-name faculty writing your letters, it looks good, but this is so rare you’re unlikely to be competing with these cases.</p>
<p>2 research letters is outstanding-- many people have 0 or 1. Committees expect the third letter (sometimes even the second letter) to be run-of-the-mill, simply because ugrads haven’t had enough time to build research relationships.</p>