Are you kidding me? Reference letters are the most important thing. I don't know if you went to grad school or not but if you get a letter of recommendation from a horn professor who's known in his field you are a practical shoe in. I know tons of people that have gotten into highly ranked programs and have gotten jobs purely out of getting letters of recommendation from certain people.

how cute you followed me around and found an old post to bark about after bitching at me about the iphone thread. and then you conveniently leave out the exception to what i'd said in my post in your quote. i said it only really matters if the professor reviewing your app knows the professor writing the reference. and in that case, they'll probably just call or email the other prof anyways. besides, it's not like dogmeat is talking about MIT here.

honestly, wtf do you think a professor is going to write about you? "oh he's a hard worker, blah blah blah". if you really think that every professor that writes these things doesn't have a couple of pre-formatted form letters that they slightly modify for each student, you're delusional. despite whatever relationship you think you have with them, they have better things to than sit around for hours on end trying to decide what made you different from the other ten thousand students they've had in their career. and the professor who's reading it knows it's full of just as much bullshit as the recommendations he writes for his students.

i've read a lot of letters of recommendation from both of my jobs (i was involved in hiring new developers) and we literally just sat around with a stack of them reading em to each other, laughing at the monotonous bullshit that was in them. there was crap like "so-in-so has a great understanding of object oriented development", or "so-in-so demonstrated an excellent ability to work in groups" blah blah blah.

i think letters are overrated too. but if you happen to have a letter from some harvard scholar or industry god i think it could give you an advantage.

These letters don't have to be from only professors. I think they can come from practically anyone who's not related to you. The concept of these letters is for the graduate school to get an idea of who you are. If all they wanted to know are you grades, they already have that. So like when you applied to college in the first place, they asked for recommendation letters from tea

from all the recruiters for jobs and graduate schools ive talked to they say experience and good letters of recommendation is the best advantage.
"uh heh im kind of scared about my GRE score"
"oh haha will you have letters of recommendations?"
"yes"
"youll be fine!"

that was today. from a dude in the applications department at one of the top universities in my field

of course having a GOOD letter of recommendation is better than one full of bullshit. thats obvious

if you can get one from someone that will actually write one for you thats great. if you dont have those connections then do the next best thing and if you worked in the field with someone that got to know you and you did a good job try to find them.
can you possibly get in without them? sure. but they definitely help and many schools (all the ones i looked at) 3 is a requirement

it also depends on the department and program.

my GRE of 1380 wasn't good enough for Michigan's grad program I applied to, but i had the rest of the package taken care of.

another school told me that whenever i apply to just have all the paperwork done because they like my research and publications

we're all generalizing and then biting the heads off of someone else for generalizing.

that's why i liked smaller classes in grad school.
gave you a chance to interact with your professors and get to know them as people.
some of my grad professors would even come hang out with us at chimys after class.
every professor in my undergraduate would have no clue who i was.

my major (undergrad) at tech was like this until about mid last year

I find it hard to believe that you can't find three professors to write you a letter. Yes they may be mostly pre-formulated, but that's all the grad school is asking, right? They're not asking profs to write bios of you. Just to say you got good grades, proved you were reliable by coming to class every time and doing all your coursework, and that you contributed to the environment by being courteous to fellow students and not being a troublemaker. I think saying "boo hoo no one knows me well enough to write my life story" is more of a cop out than form letters. Just my 2.

This post has been edited by Spectatrix: Oct 16 2007, 08:59 PM

I figure I'm about 2 months away from a sizeable pay raise and a small promotion.

Not quitting. If the oil business dries up I'll go back to grad school, but I think until then I really just need the money

I remember being told that if you cant find someone that knows you well and can provide lots of good info in their letter then provide that info for them.

give them a cover letter/packet with some points they can make and outline different things they can mention in the letter.

make it as easy for them as you can.