I wanted to provide a brief guide to my primary posts on recommendations.
For overall advice, I would suggest beginning with 10 KEY POINTS FOR WRITING AN EFFECTIVE RECOMMENDATION: WHAT EVERY RECOMMENDER SHOULD KNOW, which provides core advice for what recommenders need to know. Applicants can use this post to help educate recommenders. While it is primarily focused on MBA recommendations, the overall advice provided is applicable to all sorts of graduate school recommendations.
In Further Comments on Selecting the Right Recommenders, I provide applicants with some very detailed advice on how to select the right recommenders. This post addresses the most common kinds of questions that my clients and blog readers have asked me about selecting recommenders.
In HBS MBA Program Class of 2015 MBA Essays and Recommendations, I provide my analysis of the four questions that HBS requires recommenders to answer. I do intend, at some point, to analyze other schools' recommendation questions.
My guest blogger, Steve Green, prepared a post specifically focused non-MBA graduate school school recommendations, Letters of Recommendation for Academic Graduate Degree Applicants. He also did a post on recommendations letters for MPA and MPP programs, Letters of Recommendation for Public Policy Programs.
Recommendations can be a particularly difficult part of the application process for many candidates, so I hope the above posts are helpful.
-Adam Markus
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I am a graduate admissions consultant who works with clients worldwide. If you would like to arrange an initial consultation, please complete my intake form, which is publicly available on google docs here, and then send your completed form to adammarkus@gmail.com. You can also send me your resume if it is convenient for you. Please don't email me any essays, other admissions consultant's intake forms, your life story, or any long email asking for a written profile assessment. The only profiles I assess are those with people who I offer initial consultations to. See here for why. Please note that initial consultations are not offered when I have reached full capacity or when I determine that I am not a good fit with an applicant.
