A letter is written in an hour. Will that be a good one?

[mphct]

Hi guys,

 

I sent a reminder of LoR to my proff. about the application deadline. He replied me within an hour and 10 mms saying that the letter has been done and sent. Although the proff. has decades of experiences in writing letters, and he knows me well, I still wonder if such a short time of writing would make my letter less strong?

 

By contrary, another recommender of mine looked carefully on the LoR package I sent to him (even asked a naunced question) and wrote it several days before he sent it out.

 

I am a bit concerned.

Edited December 19, 2013 by mphct

[Canis]

Couldn't he have written the letter already, but not finished and submitted it - which is what he did when you reminded him?

[mphct]

Thanks Canis! But I doubt it will be the case, since usaully proffs are way too busy to do that. Especially in my case, I know he will have to write letters for many students. When I asked him if he would be willing to write me a letter, he replied immediately (1 minute after I sent out the email) with a positive yes. I hope that's a positive sign.

[fuzzylogician]

Stop worrying about things that are outside of your control, especially when there is no evidence that there is a reason to worry. The prof is experienced and I bet has a skeleton he can use for letters, so not everything needs to be done from scratch. Furthermore, it's not the first time he writes such a letter, he knows what he's doing. An hour sounds like a reasonable time to spend on this (and besides, that's what you've got so it had better do!). 

[St Andrews Lynx]

I don't think most faculty would spend more than an hour actually writing a LOR. These things only take up ~1-1.5 sides of A4 paper and tend to follow certain well-defined conventions.

Think about it this way - a professor could spend 3 hours writing an LOR, but that doesn't guarantee that it would be strong. Similarly, a professor could write a letter in 30 minutes but if they are well-known in their field and say that you are one of the Top 5 students they've ever seen, then it could be a really strong letter. 

Stop worrying and go enjoy Christmas!

[hikaru1221]

Think of how much time John Nash's professor spent on writing this single-line recommendation: "This man is a genius."

Edited December 19, 2013 by hikaru1221

[TakeruK]

An hour is a reasonable time to spend on a LOR. You don't know that the other prof spent much more time on their letter either--they could have looked at your materials, wrote something up in about an hour, asked you that question, incorporated their answer and let it sit and then submitted it!

 

You could think about it in a different way too. If you add up salary, benefits, opportunity cost of the research they could be doing/supervising, and cost of computer equipment, office space, electricity etc. a professor costs about several hundred thousand dollars a year. If they work 50 hours per week for 50 weeks a year, this is 2500 hours per year. 200,000/yr (lowball estimate) divided by 2500 hours is $80/hr. Profs have to write a ton of letters too--for their current students, former students, current postdocs, former postdocs, and colleagues (for awards, tenure promotion at other universities etc.). Money isn't always the best way to think about the value of things, but sometimes it helps to put a number on it (or at least provide an interesting alternative perspective).

Edited December 19, 2013 by TakeruK

[mphct]

Thank you everyone!