Bale
AS A PERSON SUFFERED A LOT IN APPLICATIONS AND AT LAST GOT WHAT I WANT, I'D LIKE
TO SHARE SOME OF MY EXPERIENCES AND IDEAS IN RECOMMENDATIONS , TO HELP THOSE
HONORABLE NEW COMERS, AND THOSE WHO ARE SEPARATED, BY ANY REASON , LIKE MY
WIFE AND ME.
In my opinion, the most important thing in application differs much from people
people, from school to school. But generally speaking, they will consider all t
he materials they have and at last, if there are STH VERY OUTSTANDING CONCERNING
you, they will surely give you what you want.
among the most important things, including recommendaiotns, transcripts,
score in GRE and Tofel, the most common standard is that TRANSCRIPT, TOEFL,
GRE SUB, GRE GENERAL, then the recommendation.
The recommendation becam the most trivial thing in this procession is because:
(1) USA professors seems already know that few letters were written by faculty
members, they are always the work of students'.
(2) There are few professors in china which are famous and willing to write rec
ommedations for students who is going out.
(3) Most professors are not so famous as to be useful in deciding the students'
being admitted or not.
But we have some exceptions here. When you are lucky enough to find a famous pr
ofessor, famous to be known by many professors in USA, Acedamy members are not
enough in this issue though. To provide a in stance, like Zhang Dainian, Chen
daisun, or Zhou Guangzhao, or some people who are very close friend or holding
close relations with the professors you are applying, these peoples recommendations
will be extremely useful.
Anyway, the recommendations are required in the applications, so we need to choose
the recommendations and the people to write it. There are 6 kinds of recommendations,
each is worse then the next one.
(1) Letters written by you, signed by famous professor or professor closely related
to the school you are applying;
(2)Letters written by you, corrected by those people as refered above;
(3)Letters written by you, signed by common faculty professors;
(4)letters written by you, corrected by those people as above;
(5)Letters written by famous people and you have no access to it;
(6)Letters written by common ones.
Choose your letters in the order above, and there are many sad experiences concerning
the case against this basic rule: I was refused by 4 top schools just because
I have used a very famous academy memeber's four reference letters.
There are many other skills concerning the resume, etc. which I will cover next
time. I guess as a conclusion, to make your reference letter useful, you must,
(1) Make totally good words in it, or make it more realistic, put sth. bad but
not improtant at all; (2)Choose relevant peopel to write it, either they do no
t know, or they knwo very well, Academy member in other fields will equals to
common ones, or even worse because you can not get good words from them generally
speaking.