<p>Currently, I realize that my grad school application will require 2 letters of recommendation. However, there are other things that need letters of recommendations such as various scholarships, leadership positions, REUs and whatnot. On one hand, it's completely unreasonable to ask just 1 or 2 professors to write you all the letters of recommendations that you need throughout college. On the other hand, I can't get close to every professor I encounter.</p>
<p>How am I suppose to meet the demands of the letters of recommendations that are required for the various things that need them?</p>
<p>It’s fine to ask the same few professors for multiple letters. It’s drafting the letter that consumes time and effort. Printing, emailing or uploading multiple copies is fast and effortless.</p>
<p>It’s never been clear to me what teachers/professors put on their recommendations. Are they long, short. Do they address why you would be good for grad school, or whatever it is that the letter is addressing, or do they simply reflect the professor’s thought about you as a student, worker and individual?</p>
<p>I’ve never read a letter of recommendation, so I have no idea. And what do people mean when they say “exploding letters of recommendation?” does anybody even know what that actually means?</p>
Ideally your professors would write long, detailed letters that are tailored towards the purpose of the application. In practice, professors need to write too many letters (one told me that he wrote letters for 50 different students last semester, with multiple letters for each student) and don’t know most of their students well enough to write a new letter for each single application. They will probably write a generic letter that comments on as much as they can comment on (your work ethics, academic potential, personality, …) and occasionally update it if you keep working with them and ask them for more letters in later semesters.</p>
<p>There’s an entire science to asking the right people for letters of recommendation. For example, some professors only write generic letters or routinely submit them 2 weeks late. Other professors have a reputation for writing overly glowing letters for everybody. (Like, every student is the most talented student that the professor has seen in a decade.) This might help or hurt you, depending on whether the recipient of the letter is aware of that reputation. Other professors hold students to such high standards that barely anyone can get a positive letter.</p>
<p>If other students from your university are applying to the same programs you are (e.g. REUs or grad schools), try not to get recommendations from the same professors. This puts professors in a tricky situation where they need to recommend one student over the other, or else write generic-sounding letters for each student so that no one is at a disadvantage compared to the other. (Recommending one student over another seems unproblematic for a single application, but it gets problematic for things like graduate schools. It might turn out that one student gets all of the offers and the other student comes out empty-handed.) </p>
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I have never heard that phrase before and neither has Google.</p>