Letters of Recommendation from Tech professors? Options

[Dogmeat]

Ok I'm wondering how to go about doing this.

There isn't a single mechanical engineering professor in the tech ME department that would even have a clue who I was if I emailed them asking for a letter of recommendation, and the grad school I'm applying to requires three of them.

What do I do?

Do they just hand these things out to anyone or do you actually have to prove to them you deserve it?

I think I _MIGHT_ be able to get Dr. Oler to give me one, and MAYBE Dr. Muga ....

I mean should I just email the instructors I know I got good grades from and be like "Hi! Recommend me!"......?

[impala454]

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.