Teacher Rec's

[DougieG]

I'm a jr at SDSU and today in my history (my major) seminar class thingy we had a lady come in from the history honors society and yada yada yada she mentioned teacher rec's. The recommendations for this honor society is no big deal, just a few sentences saying you're a good student and whatever emailed to the advisor or whatever the faculty member in charge of the honor society is.

But this got me thinking, as I have been reading about different grad schools' requirements for history programs, or just grad school programs in general, and most (all?) require teacher recommendations. Since SDSU is a big school and history is a very easy major with tons of classes to choose from I have virtually no personal relationships with any of my profs except for the one in this seminar class (15 of us in it so naturally I have some repoir...repoire...re-poor phonetically). What are the teacher rec's like for grad school? I remember the ones I needed coming out of high school were pretty serious and depended very much on my relationships with the teachers. Is it like this? Do I need to start going to office hours just for the purpose of developing a relationship to use as a teacher rec?

FWIW I think it wouldn't be an issue getting into SDSU's grad program for history but as I have started to actually see the value in my education (unlike in high school) I have done better and am looking into schools of a higher caliber for graduate programs, schools where I assume teacher recommendations may matter.

Sorry this is so wordy. Hopefully it'll get the attention of Ganjasaurus Rex and any other profs out there as well, most notably on how they would react to a student coming to their office hours for this sole purpose? I feel quite uncomfortable about the idea of forcing a relationship with a prof or two just to garnish a rec at the end of it, but is this what I have to do?