My english teacher knows me REALLY well, and I’m sure she’ll write me an absolutely brilliant recommendation (i’m planning to major in english). Will this help my application, or is it normal to have really really personalised recommendations?
Thank you!
It depends to some degree where you’re applying. At some places, the emphasis is on the objective criteria. Letters of recommendation, essays, interviews, may not play as big a part of the admissions process as elsewhere.
At some schools (Ivies, for example). the letters of recommendation may be a principal means of differentiating applicants from each other, and thus, a good letter of recommendation may take on real importance.
It’s a good thing if your English teacher is willing to write you a bang-up letter.
For highly- and most-selective institutions, recommendations generally are very important. Incidentally, I am sure your English teacher would note the “english” is improper grammar (good grief, you indicate your intention to major in this subject).
Good recommendations won’t get you in, necessarily, but poor or tepid ones can get you rejected. An enthusiastic letter of recommendation is a meaningful component in a competitive application at highly-selective schools.
For all the Ivy Leagues,Stanford, MIT etc., they list letter of recs as “very important” on their common data set.
This means letter of recs hold the same weight as GPA, EC’s, Test Scores and such.
They offer a I would say unbiased point of view on the student and kind of verifies what the student says in his/her essays. The teacher recs give insight into how the student is a leader in the classroom, how the student is a hard-worker, an inquisitive individual.
It wouldn’t be impressive if I said I was hard-working, caring and responsible. However, it would be extremely impressive if for example, the teacher said I basically learned the material beforehand and taught the class the material when the teacher was sick or something like that.
Anecdotes like that further emphasize what kind of student the applicant is, it underscores the intangibles of the student that can’t otherwise be expressed on an application. (You can’t really put I am caring on an application, but a good teacher rec might clearly express that idea for you).