"He came to class and got an A” x 3 -- How much can this hurt?

[harbindreams]

How much can three mediocre letters hurt an application? I wish I had gone out of my way to get more one on one time with my professors. Unfortunately, I didn't...

It's not that I am a bad student. I have the highest GPA in my masters program and my professors seem to have a generally positive impression of me. The only problem is I that I am not particularly close to any of them! I'm not sure how I let this happen given that one of my goals when I started this program was to make sure that I would get awesome recommendation letters in case I decided to continue with graduate school later.

I did find some professors who are supportive and said they would be happy to write letters for me. I had long discussions with each of them about my goals, research interests, and general background, and they have copies of my SOP, resume, GRE scores, and transcripts. Still, the extent of their experience with me is that I took their class, got a good grade, maybe wrote a good term paper, and I can only worry about what kind of letters they would write! Would three letters like this doom my chances of getting into a decent program anywhere?

Edit: could it be a good idea to swap one of these letters for a good professional reference?

Edited October 22, 2012 by harbindreams

[Eigen]

Out of undergrad, I would see this hurting your application.

Out of a Masters, I could see this being even more damaging.

To what degree, I'm not sure- and there may be more discipline specific answers that could help. But in general, letters saying you're a good student aren't very helpful at all, because your transcript already shows that. Letters that are helpful will discuss your research potential, quality of your work, etc.

[Radian]

I remember once one of the professors I was asking a LOR from for my MSc application told me "you should ask LOR only from professor who you have done research with" ... and well ... I couldn't stop laughing at his logic for weeks !

How many professor are you supposed to do research with in 1 year or 2 ?! If you are doing a nice job and you are being funded you will be working for 1 person ! otherwise your knowledge would not be enough if you have swapped too many professors in your masters.

That being said, it's completely natural ! people will look at your ADVISOR's LOR first ! that's the person who can evaluate your research skills ! The rest would judge you on other aspects.

I don't know if you have seen a LOR form or not but there are many questions there 25% percent of which are really related to your research ! there are even questions about honesty and personal habits like being social !!!

If you haven't done any research in your Masters though, that's a different catastrophe !! then probabely the LORs are the last things you should be worried about

Edited October 24, 2012 by Radian

[Eigen]

Actually, in a thesis based masters, you probably have done research with multiple faculty. Either in rotations, or as committee members for your thesis.

They don't have to be your single, sole advisor for you to have done research with them. There are also collaborators who you've done smaller more specific projects with.

And that's even more true as an undergraduate. Between your primary research advisor, collaborators, and possibly independent study-based research, you should have multiple faculty who have worked with you in a research-based capacity.

And as for the "forms", they aren't as important as the letter itself. And there are lots of questions that don't exactly relate to research, but they should be answered from the perspective of a research advisor, as they're trying to get at how stable/easy to work with you are.

[Radian]

Actually, in a thesis based masters, you probably have done research with multiple faculty. Either in rotations, or as committee members for your thesis.

They don't have to be your single, sole advisor for you to have done research with them. There are also collaborators who you've done smaller more specific projects with.

And that's even more true as an undergraduate. Between your primary research advisor, collaborators, and possibly independent study-based research, you should have multiple faculty who have worked with you in a research-based capacity.

And as for the "forms", they aren't as important as the letter itself. And there are lots of questions that don't exactly relate to research, but they should be answered from the perspective of a research advisor, as they're trying to get at how stable/easy to work with you are.

I think maybe we are looking from two different prospectives probably two different major (science vs. engineering) at the problem cause I dont know of any one rotating arround doing a master's thesis in engineering. In PhD that's different and yes I'v seen.

in terms of forms vs. letters! well lets agree to disagree.

[Eigen]

So you might not have seen any programs with rotations. But that still doesn't answer the question of collaborators and thesis committee.

As to the forms vs. letters... Do you have support for the fact that form answers matter more than the letters themselves? If so, I'd really like to see that, because it's completely off from what I've heard from our admissions committee and elsewhere.

[TakeruK]

I just want to add that although I'm not in engineering, my science MSc did not have any rotations. In fact, for almost all the work I've done, the majority of the work was numerical/theoretical, which is usually done in smaller groups so that I only had one faculty member to work with. However, when I was finishing my BSc and applying for MSc, I still had 3 LOR writers who supervised research. I think that many applicants will have at least 2 research supervisor LORs -- one from their honours/senior thesis and one from a previous summer project. My engineering friends generally didn't do a thesis in 4th year but they all had to do a senior project under the supervisor of a Professional Engineer to graduate, which should count for the same weight.

As for summer projects, I think a prepared undergrad should have at least one lined up. During my second year, my profs started to advise us to start thinking about doing research if we want to continue in academia (or at least keep the grad school option open). After all, even if we already wanted to go to grad school, we should actually see if we like research first! At the very least, it does have academic value -- research/doing projects teaches things that a classroom lecture might miss!

So, the prepared undergrad would have 2 summers (2nd and 3rd year) to find at least one research project to work on. Unfortunately, I think the student who decides at the beginning of fourth year that they want to go to grad school, with no previous research experience, will have a much harder time getting into a good program. It's not impossible -- I know one person who had no research experience but their grades got them into a top 5 program. However, I think it's safe to say that a "solid" application would contain at least 1, if not 2, LORs from research supervisors. When I TA undergrad classes and my students ask about grad school, I always advise them to seek research projects ASAP and to aim for 3 different people to get LORs from (whether it's doing 3 different projects, or working with multiple faculty on different parts of a bigger project etc.)

[Radian]

So you might not have seen any programs with rotations. But that still doesn't answer the question of collaborators and thesis committee.

As to the forms vs. letters... Do you have support for the fact that form answers matter more than the letters themselves? If so, I'd really like to see that, because it's completely off from what I've heard from our admissions committee and elsewhere.

My info is just like yours. From our admission committees. Actually, one of the professors who is writing me LOR is the admission head of our Physics department. My adviser also believes in the same thing. Though, his name would do me the favor alone. :-)

One thing I know for sure is that schools really differ in their application review process. Even from department to department within same school they follow different protocols.