Dear Alma, My professor is holding me back
UncategorizedFrom our agony aunt’s mailbag:
Dear Alma,
How many years is long enough?
I’m a second year masters student, recruited by my studio professor to be his Teaching Assistant. He has known me since March 2023, and I have been teaching for him for 1 year. He writes glowing reviews of my teaching on my TA evaluations. This is from my most recent evaluation:
My TA communicates about once a week on the status of each student. She is very attentive to their progress and takes notes during our weekly Rep class meetings for her own pedagogical research. My TA was assigned to lead a couple of the Rep classes this semester which she did successfully. She takes her teaching duties very seriously, and she shared with me written comments and reviews from her students that were very positive and demonstrated that my TA has a promising future in teaching.
So naturally, I asked him for a letter of recommendation as I apply for doctoral programs.
He said no. He said he didn’t think he knows me or my teaching well enough and that a year is not long enough to write a recommendation. It’s not like my school has a doctoral program to keep me studying with him. So what might be my professor’s reasoning for refusing to write a letter? He has been complimentary of my teaching in evaluations submitted to the university that employs him!
Seriously Annoyed
Dear Seriously Annoyed,
I have been on many sides of the recommendation tradition since I was a teenager. The side of asking people to write for you, the side of reading recommendations for incoming college students, and the side of writing recommendations. I can tell you that all three experiences are very different and have their own complications.
I will respond as a person who both reads recommendations and is asked to write them. As a reader, committees run the gamut from barely skimming letters, just checking who wrote them, to discussing them at length. When I am in a situation in which a deep read of a recommendation is happening, there is always much speculation or “reading between the lines”. What did the person leave out? Is there a hidden warning or some kind of negative comment? If so, it can be very damaging for the person auditioning, no matter how wonderfully they play their instrument.
As a person who regularly writes recommendations, in 95% of the cases, I am absolutely pleased as a pickle to write for the person. Writing recommendations takes quite a bit of time, can be inconvenient, and nowadays requires signing into a system with a password in order to upload. So it is certainly work, and takes commitment to write and submit.
I do, every year, get one or two students asking for recommendations who I am not particularly psyched about writing for. It can be a number of reasons – how our lessons went, their attitude to others, their ability to complete tasks, their performances. In these cases, I am at a crossroads, because either I would rather not write a letter, or I feel obligated to be honest in my assessment, therefore potentially hurting the student’s chance. In these cases I usually put the student off for a while, saying it would be hard for me to make the deadline and they should look elsewhere, or something like this, hoping they get the clue.
If your professor is hemming and hawing, I would read that loud and clear and not ask them for a recommendation. Whatever their reason, they are sending you a signal that their letter would not be glowing.
Writing recommendations, although an unspoken part of our jobs, is not an obligation. It’s a choice.
Look amongst your past teachers and mentors and find people you particularly connected with to ask for recommendations. It’s a great time to be creative. A conductor? A classroom teacher? Even one of the students you are teaching as a TA!
Think outside the box and make sure you are finding people who will truly advocate for you.
Questions for Alma? Please put them in the comments section or send to [email protected]
There could be a problem, though. As a doctoral candidate, doubtless hoping to get teaching while in the programme, to cite previous TA experience in the application yet not be able to get a reference from the prof you assisted looks bad.
The correspondent appears to have copies of the evaluations. If it were me, I would take those to the prof and ask him if he could not make a good reference based upon them, and ask how he came to those conclusions but does not feel able to pass them on framed positively — he will know what’s needed for a rec to be worthwhile.
However, to get a TA gig he must have had some recommendations about you, so perhaps the people who proffered them will have to do, along with the evaluations (by the prof for whom you TA) themselves. You could ask him if he would mind them being used in your application, and, should the university you apply to follow them up with a call to him, if he would back them up positively.
He can certainly say he has only known you a year, but your work in that year has been very good. If the time period is his only reservation, it should not be an insuperable problem.
I understand what you mean, but I agree with Alma: just leave it. There could be a myriad of reasons why he doesn’t want to write a recommendation letter for this person at this moment. You don’t want to push them on it and potentially ruin the otherwise good relationship they enjoy. She can mention the positive evaluations in her application letter, and choose someone else for the letter of recommendation.
The number of people who’d love to ask Alma questions but fear getting identified in the real world and face the consequences….our world is far smaller than you think.
I sometimes ak my boss for a recommendation because I want to find another job, but he wouldn’t do that because then he would have to type his comments himself.
Sally
That, dare one say, would do nothing for the quality of the comments.
Could it be that ability as a TA does not necessarily point to ability to do a PhD?
Fair observation, but the TA positions tend to go to the students with the best academic records It’s more likely that star academics will not necessarily be good teachers.
So use the written statements you have, that should be sufficient.
Dear Alma,
I’m in middle school and my mom said I have to take music lessons until the end of the school year. But I really hate playing music! I’ve tried a lot of different music instruments and I hate them all.
It’s no fun trying to read music when I don’t want to. How I survive the rest of the year?
Sad
I know, it’s a great misunderstanding of parents to think that it’s good for their children to play an instrument or to have some contact with that music. My own parents forced me to play the piano from 5 onwards and since I’ve two left hands that was very traumatic. When I finally could say those awful lessons goodby when I got 15, I promised myself to never have anything to do with classical music stuff, but alas, look where I ended. Life is difficult! It goes different all the time.
Sally
Simply not writing one for her could be worse if it’s clear on her application materials that she’s a student of his. I’ve read recs before and if I knew Susie were studying with Bill but I don’t see a rec from Bill there in the file, I’d start asking questions.
Something similar happened as I was applying to undergraduate institutions and it required me to delay applying to the music program for another year (during which I studied privately with a fabulous new teacher who rebuilt me technically and was able to knock out several classes toward my minor). By the time the next application cycle had begun, I’d already endeared myself to several actual professors (which this previous person was not) so I had an even stronger admissions portfolio anyway. And then that previous person had to see me in the halls for the next 3 years, successfully pursuing the degree they’d tried to keep me out of. That was fun. 🙂