Yesterday I wrote about the importance of recommendation letters and the need to have your references tailored for each application. For the sake of clarity, a referee refers to a professor, basically. One that writes recommendations for you, specifically.
When I wrote my post yesterday, I forgot to cover one very important thing, which is talking about the importance of fit for when you’re selecting your references for your application. Unlike yesterday’s title, today’s post title is not very obvious. What do mean by this referee fit then?
In the sense I’m using it, “fit” describes how well the research experience between you, your referee, and the program you’re applying to align.
When selecting referees for your application, you have to make sure that your referee is someone that is conducting or has conducted research in the same field as the program you’re applying to. This way, he can properly evaluate or assess your capability for that line of research from his experience in the field. His recommendation will be taken more seriously this way.
Just like I was saying yesterday about how you can have a great letter for a wrong program, you can also have a great letter from the wrong person. For instance, having your Earth Science professor write you a recommendation for for a computer science program you’re interested in is not…great. I like to think no one would do this, right? Right. But that’s simply because the discrepancy here is very wide and noticeable.
How about if you had to choose between your immunology professor and chemistry professor for a recommendation for a program in chemistry with a research focus in immunology, who do you choose?
Another thing to consider is…
If your referee is very popular in the field of the program you’re interested in, their recommendation might just be your ticket into the program.
What I’m about to say now, you’ll have to consider with a very open-mind, but recommendations from professors are better than recommendations from simple post-docs, just like a post-docs reference is better than someone with a Bsc.
By simple post-docs, I mean just PhD holders without the professor title. Professors tend to have a lot more experience (and publications) than doctorate students and regular post-docs, so their judgement on whether you’re fit for graduate school and research will appear as a more accurate and trusted reflection of your capabilities. If you get what I mean.
Both imagesin this post are from pexels
