<p>Hi All,</p>
<p>I picked up a Kindle book earlier this week called Tips On Getting Into Harvard Amazon.com:</a> Tips on Getting in to Harvard - My Story with Accompanying Admissions Essays eBook: David Lokshin: Kindle Store. It's really short but there is some good information in there. Anyway, he writes that recommendations are an important part of the application and one that we have the least control over. So he suggests creating relationships that "span beyond the classroom" so that the teacher writing the recommendation takes an interest in my daughters success.</p>
<p>This makes sense to me, but I don't really understand how to do this. I can't invite one of my daughter's teachers over to dinner or something like that. How does she realistically build a relationship with a teacher that's more than just student / teacher?</p>
<p>I'd appreciate any thoughts.</p>
<p>For your daughter’s sake, please don’t invite her teachers over for dinner.</p>
<p>There are a number of ways that she can build a closer relationship with her teachers. Here’s what I did:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>I asked one of my teachers to sponsor a school club that I wanted to start. The club turned out to be nothing interesting (an excuse for friends to get together after school with a little outside funding) but it gave me the opportunity to have spontaneous chats with this teacher that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. The “outside the classroom” relationship only grew from there</p></li>
<li><p>If you’re doing something that your teacher might find interesting, tell her/him about it! I once had some poetry published as part of an exercise I did on a museum tour at the Getty. My teacher loved it.</p></li>
<li><p>A math teacher of mine loved brainteasers and puzzles of all kinds. I <em>LOVE</em> puzzles and brainteasers. Needless to say we spent a lot solving puzzles of all kinds (If there are 10 people in a room, what’s the likelihood that one shares a birthday with you?) When you spend that much time solving puzzles and hanging out, you get to talking about other things. By the time it came to writing letters of recommendations, he knew everything there was to know about me.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>P.S. I’m the author of the linked Kindle book (more of an essay). In the the next version I’ll definitely expand this section to make it a bit clearer. Thanks for the (inadvertent) user feedback!</p>