You can portray yourself as the next Einstein through your CV or write a spectacular, reality show–ready sob story in your SOP, but how can the selection committee validate what it is like to work with you before allowing you to work with them? To solve this chicken-and-egg problem, a Letter of Recommendation (LoR) comes into the picture.

LoR serves as your character certificate in the applications. You will almost always require at least 3 people you previously worked with to vouch for you, with some scope to add more if you would like to. These recommenders should ideally be someone who guided you on a long-term project, such as a bachelor’s or master’s thesis, a summer research internship, or a supervised learning project. You can also reach out to your corporate internship or job manager, technical head, or a director-level person to write for you if you are still on good terms. The worst-case scenario is to reach out to professors with whom you took multiple courses or received a really good grade. The goal here is to see if you have any worthy champions to root for you in this trial by combat. It is good for you if you can find more than 4 people so that some can be kept as a buffer in case someone else decides to ghost you at the last moment. Do note that quality matters more than quantity. So, choose only those who might write candidly instead of just stamping your name on a generic template.

Ideally, make sure that you reach out to them 3-4 months before the application deadline. Remind them that you are still around and reminisce about your time with them. Inform them of your plans, including which universities you will be applying to and their respective LoR requirements. Make sure that you are both on the same page, as some might upfront quote a maximum cap on the number of LoRs they can write. For example, one of my internship guides, an emeritus US university professor, has a rule of 4 LoRs per student, so you need to be very decisive while asking for their favor. Luckily, I applied to just 4 universities, so that worked out just fine for me.

Universities usually ask you to provide the email credentials of your recommenders to submit your letter. Sometimes there is an option to send it directly as a PDF on the portal. Prefer to send that over email and ask your recommender to use their official email ID to build legitimacy. Moreover, there is a checkbox which asks you whether you wish them to snitch on your recommender and let you peek into their submission. But the cost is that your recommender will be informed that you subscribed to this devil’s offer. A good practice is to not check it as it shows you trust your recommender well and conveys the same to the writer. Sometimes ignorance is indeed bliss.

Though your worst nightmare can be that your recommender doesn’t know how to write one or is lazy enough to ask you to write it. I know a couple of people who had to face this pain in the arse. In such a case, make a draft keeping their perspective in mind as the writer while still being grounded. Share a couple of anecdotes from your interaction with them to make it natural and send this to them to copy over to their official letterhead. If there are multiple such recommenders, then make sure you change the tone of your write-up for each so as not to make it obvious to the reviewers.

Now the toughest part is to keep reminding them to submit it before the deadline. Even though some universities might keep the window open even after the application submission date, for your own sanity get it done ASAP! As a rule of thumb, provide the details of your recommenders well in advance on the university portal and submit only once you have received all letters. Ideally, you should have their letters submitted at least 2–3 weeks before the deadline. Keeping this much margin in mind is essential since your recommender might genuinely get busy with their lives while you race against time near the deadline.

So far, the advice that I gave is applicable for universities that have a formal committee-based admission system, followed in the US, Canada, Australia, etc. But for almost all European universities which have project-based hiring, the application window is not well defined and is usually scattered across the entire year. The only great part is that they will ask for LoRs only if you get selected, so you don’t have to bug your recommender every now and then. In such a case, it’s a blessing to have recommenders with patience as a virtue. Hence, if you are planning for such universities, then do inform them about expected timelines thoroughly.

Well, now since you are done emailing your recommenders, count your blessings and continue working on other aspects of your application package. Just hope that none of your recommenders turn out to be wolves in sheep’s clothing.