MANAGING YOUR RECOMMENDATION PORTFOLIO

Overview

A ceaseless effort to stand out successfully from the crowd--that could be the way you think of your endeavors to enter the health professions when you are having one of your pensive moments. To achieve this goal you need to work on several fronts: the academic, the health-related, and the interpersonal. Doing a good job in each one of these areas will give you several clear and distinct benefits as an applicant to schools of the health professions, and ultimately as a health care professional.

Success in academics will give you solid grades to make you competitive and the reasoning skills that will help you do well on major preprofessional exams and well in your health professional education. Good health-related experience enables you to be sure of your choice of a career in health professions. If your first-hand experience of the health professions is solid and if your reading knowledge of what is going on in health care is strong you will be able to form a fairly reasonable picture of what your career will be like. You will also begin to get a sense of what you as a unique individual have to bring to the field--admissions committees can be quite interested in this. Interpersonal skills are that broad realm of abilities and insights where the more experience you have the better you are as a leader, a listener, and a communicator--all three of these roles can be crucial to a successful career in the health professions.

When you apply to schools of the health professions your academic, health-related, and interpersonal strengths will be communicated to schools through a few channels. You could say that admissions committees have three windows or constructs through which they view you and all other applicants before they make the judgement as to who the best candidates are. The first construct is the "numerical window;" this is your transcript and the results of any professional test that you need to take. The second construct is the "recommendation window," feedback from professors, instructors, research directors, supervisors, and perhaps health care professionals. The third construct through which admissions committees view you is your own "personal communication window;" this is how you express yourself both on personal statements and in an interview.

In this piece, we are going to focus on the second window through which admissions committees see you: recommendations. Recommendations are important, and can have a direct bearing on whether or not schools ever take a close look at you through the "third window," the interview. Some students don't realize it, but it can be easier to neglect recommendations than it is to neglect academics or health-related experience. This is how such a situation can arise.

RECOMMENDATIONS IN PERSPECTIVE

We can say that your preparation for a career in the health professions is centered on course work. Each health profession requires that a specific set of natural science courses be completed by all applicants. In a vast number of cases, schools of the health professions want to see grades for English composition courses, English literature, and perhaps statistics, psychology, sociology, and humanities as well. As a student, most of your activities on any given day are going to revolve around courses: lectures, your time for studying, and your exams. By the sheer amount of time you have to devote to them, your academics will always be uppermost in your mind. This is good in a sense, because in the final analysis there is no substitute for a good transcript.

Even though nothing else will do for you what a good transcript can, you know that a good transcript alone is not enough. After all, many students get good grades in the sciences without the slightest desire to become healers. Therefore, during each semester, you try to build up your health-related experience, your communication skills, and establish a track record for involvement and leadership on campus.

You might be working hard to stay on top of all these areas, and you have a fair sense of the actions that will bring you the results you want: studying, volunteer work in a health care setting, keeping aware of the news, and being involved in some clubs on campus. All of these things that you do will be reflected either on your transcript or on the autobiographical information that you provide to schools of the health professions. It does not automatically follow, though, that you will get letters of recommendation. A student can get an "A" in a large and difficult lecture course without ever getting to know the professor who taught that course and without ever building the possibility of getting a strong letter of recommendation. Without a letter of recommendation, the value of that grade of "A" is not diminished, but the "anonymous student" has passed up an opportunity to get an important type of feedback.

Letters of recommendation are an important part of the personal portrait of each and every applicant that admissions committees seek to paint. A transcript speaks about your academic skills, but it doesn't say anything about your personal style of learning and approaching problems. The grades you receive say nothing about what motivates you to get them. On the other hand, you can speak about yourself, the problems that you have overcome, and about what impels you to excel and succeed, but it is not possible for you to evaluate yourself in light of five, ten, twenty, or more years of experience working with students who have had the same aspirations and who have faced similar problems. The only people who can do that are your professors, and when it comes to letters of recommendation, admissions committees value the judgement and opinions of professors who write them.

It could be that this is the best way to think of letters of recommendation from your professors: a courtesy extended from one professional to another (future) professional, you. Most professors are willing to go the extra step and write a letter of recommendation so that a good student does not get "lost in the shuffle." Professors are not compensated for writing letters of recommendation, and there are no mysterious processes by which the time they spend writing letters is returned to them. Now, since the future that we are talking about is yours, not theirs, shouldn't you also take enthusiastic steps to make sure that you don't "float down the river of anonymity and out into the deep and bitter sea of remorse?"

The most basic and important thing that you can do is to get to know some of your professors. The best opportunity that you have for accomplishing this task is your professors' office hours. Office hours are intended to be a time when students can approach their professors with questions relating to the material that is taught in the course. You might have a question about something that was discussed in the lecture, or that was mentioned in a textbook. You might have an interest in reading more about a particular topic or you might have already done some extra reading that has prompted you to ask new questions. All of these types of questions are "fair game" during office hours. By engaging the material in your courses, mastering it, and developing good questions, you are strengthening yourself intellectually as well as giving your professors an insight into how you think and approach your studies--and these are the types of insights that cannot be gleaned from a multiple choice test or a transcript.

Hopefully, you will be able to do something similar in other environments. At the place where you volunteer or assist in research, pay close attention to what is going on, develop questions and, as the opportunity arises, ask them. In some fast-paced health care and research environments, it is important to be diplomatic and considerate of other people's time in addition to being inquisitive.

SPECIFICS

"This is all very well and good," you say, "I understand the process, but just how many of these letters of recommendation do I actually need?" The answer will vary depending upon the particular health profession you wish to enter and upon which schools you apply to--but three is a good number to keep in mind, and it is highly likely that two of those letters of recommendation should be from professors who have taught your prehealth science courses or advanced science courses. If you are interested in medicine, dentistry, optometry, podiatry, or veterinary medicine you know that the Faculty Committee on Health Professions requires that a minimum of three letters of recommendation be on file at the prehealth office before you can be interviewed for the Committee Letter of Evaluation.

Of course, you can have more than three letters of recommendation on file at the Prehealth Advising Office. Indeed the number of recommendations that you have on file can and should mount above three, depending on what you do. For example, one letter from a chemistry professor, one from a biology professor, a letter from a professor in the liberal arts, and one from your major advisor--that's four letters right there. If you have done research, you should ask for a letter from your research supervisor. A letter from a professor who have overseen your research is especially crucial if you intend to apply to an MD/PhD program--it is possible that you will need more than one research letter. If you are interested in osteopathic medicine, a letter from an osteopathic physician can be helpful.

We have just run through a few examples, and see that the number of letters that you might ask for could easily surpass three. The programs and professions that interest you determine, at least partly, the number and type of letters that you will ask for. The strength of your work, your interpersonal skills, and how well the recommendation writer knows you will all affect the quality of your letters--these variables are all substantially under your control.

Now, what about other heath professions? If you are interested in clinical laboratory sciences, cytotechnology, nursing, occupational therapy, physical therapy, physician assistant, respiratory care, or social welfare you need to take a look at the specific schools you want to attend. Three letters is a good rule of thumb, though, and letters documenting your experience in these health fields are also important.

Where should these letters of recommendation be sent? The best thing to do, once you know that there is someone who is willing to write you a letter of recommendation is to have the letter sent to the appropriate office here at Stony Brook, where it will be kept on file until you are applying to schools of the health professions and request that the letter be sent in support of your application. If you are interested in going into medicine, dentistry, optometry, podiatry, or veterinary medicine you should have your letters sent here to Prehealth Advising at Melville Library, room E 2360. If you are interested in clinical laboratory sciences, cytotechnology, nursing, occupational therapy, physical therapy, physician assistant, respiratory care, or social welfare you should open up a credential file at the Career Placement Center, room W-0550 in Melville Library, and have the letters sent there. At each of these offices, you can pick up recommendation forms to give to your recommenders. This makes it easier for them to complete the recommendations and send them to the right address. Always remember to ask for letters well ahead of deadlines!

There is one very important final point to remember if you are beginning to accumulate letters of recommendation for application to colleges of medicine, dentistry, optometry, podiatry, or veterinary medicine. These letters cannot be used for applying to other programs--they can be sent to graduate schools of the health professions only. For example, if you think that a professor wrote you a fantastic letter of recommendation for medical school, and you want to use that letter to apply for a summer internship, you will need to ask that professor to write you another letter for the summer internship.

When you are working in health care, you will interact with patients, administrators, and members of your own profession and other professions. For you to be an effective professional you will have to put yourself forward meet strangers and become their colleague and confidant. Anonymity will be a luxury that you cannot afford once you have made into your chosen career, and if you are serious about reaching your goals you can't afford it now.