super fast rec letter... bad news?

[hahakk]

(Attended college in the U.S.)

I asked for recommendation letters for 6 programs and got all of them submitted in 3-4 days.

The recommender was my ugrad research advisor so he is essentially the one who can talk about my research potential.

I mean, I could expect a short and fast letter from a professor who taught class since there is not much to say about, but from a research advisor, this seems "too" fast.

Anyone experienced such fast rec letter from an important recommender?

I fear that this indicates he doesn't much care about me...

[R Deckard]

How is 3-4 days fast? Did he say he wrote the letter in 15 minutes?

Did you expect him to write the next great American novel about your research ability?

[TakeruK]

I agree with R Deckard, I would probably assume that the prof has written a lot of LORs in their career so they should be very used to doing it. It is probably something that can be completed on the order of 1 hour, depending on what they have to say. In addition, only the first letter takes awhile, the next 5 letters should just be a matter of changing the school name. Maybe the prof will customize a paragraph if they have some reason to write something different for a specific school (e.g. they might compare you to a former student of theirs that is currently at that school). I know my profs did the "copy-paste-change-name" thing since some programs give you an email when the LOR is submitted and I received these emails within 1-2 minutes of each other! This is standard -- you do the same for your SOP too! Also, if the prof has already written a LOR for you in the past, they will probably reuse most of it!

The reason why people say to ask for LORs well ahead of time is that while it doesn't take very long to write a LOR, it is still hard for a busy academic to find the time to do so during the school year. Giving weeks of notice is a courtesy to allow profs to take any hour they choose over the next ~weeks to ~months to write your LOR. In your shoes, I'd be happy that your prof got that out of the way quickly, so it's one less thing you have to keep track of when you are finishing up your applications in the coming weeks.

[emmm]

Agree - this is not something you should spend time worrying about. Hopefully, you chose well, and this recommender will, indeed, have good things to say about you.

[hahakk]

I see. Thanks a lot!