Hey all,
I'm trying to nail down who my recommenders should be, and am stuck on the third recommender. My first two seem fairly obvious choices – a mentor with whom I've taken three separate classes, and my undergraduate thesis advisor. What's getting me is my third recommender. Should I ask
1) A professor that I took a class with and TA-ed for, whose work is outside of sociology but who knows me extremely well, or
2) A big-name scholar with whom I'm currently doing research, but who has only known me for about a month.
My impulse is to ask scholar #1, since scholar #2 doesn't quite know me well enough to write a detailed letter and could perhaps be more helpful later in my career, but I've heard that some schools are concerned with the recommenders' names and I want to cover my bases. Thoughts?
