Thread: Teacher Rec's
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Old 11-07-2007, 02:01 PM
Pokerdemic Pokerdemic is offline
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Default Re: Teacher Rec\'s

Well you are a junior so you have some time. Start going to office hours and ask extra questions about the material, or the research the professor does. Look into the option of writing a senior thesis so you can develop a sustained relationship with a professor.

FWIW, be sure you research programs other than SDSU. This is because graduate programs don't like academic inbreeding, and they make it tough for their own undergrads to proceed into their graduate programs.

Finally, in the humanities, letters of recommendation are suffering from inflation, much like trends in grade inflation. In other words, because everyone gets glowing letters of recommendation, they don't counts as much as, say, GRE scores.

One of my former professors has studied grad school admissions in the humanities extensively, and he is convinced GREs matter far, far more than something like letters of recommendation. So get to studying. I spent three months studying for mine and ended up with a perfect score on the verbal section (thinly veiled brag). This got me funding at 60% of the schools I applied to, which is crucial if you want to go to grad school in the humanities and not rack up mad debt.
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