Job-Market Boot Camp, Part 4: Letters of Recommendation

I'd like to continue the Cocoon's Job Market Boot Camp by discussing recommendation letters. Although the role that recommendation letters should play in hiring is debatable--as letters may be more indicative of letter-writers biases, etc., than good reflections of candidates' abilities--I have many reasons to believe that having good letters is really important. First, after my PhD, it was one of the things that just about everybody impressed upon me. I was told, basically by everyone, "you have to get letters from well-respected people outside of your department." Second, although it is very difficult to tease out causal influences, there was a distinct trend in my own case. The more outside letters I had, the more interviews I seemed to get.

But I am already getting ahead of myself. There are two very different types of situations: (1) the ABD student who has not yet graduated, and (2) the person with the PhD who has been out on the market a while. Let's discuss each situation in turn.

1. Letters of recommendation and the ABD student

As I understand it, it is okay to only have letters from your PhD program if you have not yet graduated, as it is admittedly hard to network while in grad school. That being said, the students I knew in grad school who had letters from people outside the department seemed to fare fantastically well--far better than those who only had letters from within. So, I would definitely advise grad students to try to network early and often, and try to obtain at least one outside letter before hitting the market. I'll say more about how to do this in section 3 below.

One other good thing to do--or so I've heard (more on this shortly)--is to have your department placement-director read and evaluate your letters. I have to be honest. I never did this. However, I've heard of cases where a candidate had a lukewarm letter from someone, and this (apparently) is not good. In the US, at least, it is supposed expected that all of your letters will be stellar, and one lukewarm letter may sink your candidacy. 

Third, unless you have no teaching experience at all, you should always have at least one teaching letter written by someone who has actually observed you teach. How many teaching letters do you need? I never procured more than one, and it never seemed to hurt me with teaching oriented schools. As long as the teaching letter is good and by someone who has actually seen you teach, that seems (from my experience) to be good enough.

Anything I missed?

2. Letters of recommendation after the PhD

Once you've completed your PhD, there seem to be two important things to stay on top of: (1) ensuring that your letters are updated every year or two, and (2) obtaining more letters from respected people in the profession. Let me begin with the first of these.

I've been told that it is important to keep your letters up to date, and this pretty much stands to reason. If you've been out on the market for a few years and have accomplished stuff--published some good pieces of work--it would presumably be to your advantage for your letter writers to talk up these accomplishments and your overall development as a philosopher. How do you go about it? Simple: just send an email to your letter writers seeing how things are going with them, and asking if they would mind updating your letter. In my experience, they will usually do so happily, asking for an updated CV and a few pieces of recent work. I might also add that it probably helps if you stay in touch with them independently, checking in with them a few times a year to say hello, etc. 

It's also important to keep your teaching letter(s) up to date. If you've been out on the market for a few years, in a VAP position, post-doc, whatever, have someone in a senior position at your current institution watch you teach and write a letter. 

I've only had one person respond negatively to a letter-update request, and because my experience here contradicts some of the received advice I gave above (on lukewarm letters), I figured it might be helpful to share my experience. After a couple of years out on the market, when I asked one of my recommenders if they would be willing to update their letter, the response I received was basically, "I don't know how much my letter would help you at this point"--the obvious implication being that the letter would be lukewarm at best (note: I didn't blame this person at all. My dissertation wasn't spectacular by any means, I hadn't published much at that point, and I don't think I ever much impressed them). Anyway, I thanked them for their honesty and proceeded that year without their letter...and got like no interviews. The next year, I asked the same person if I could use their own (lukewarm?) letter, they said yes, and I got a lot more interviews. So, who knows, maybe a lukewarm letter isn't a job-market death sentence, after all.

Finally, then, we come to the big question: how do you go about getting outside letters?

3. Networking and outside letters

I'll be honest about something. For most of my life, I looked at "networking" as sort of distasteful. It always seemed to me like sucking up or brown-nosing, or whatever. I now believe that this is the wrong attitude to have. Although I am still no fan of being a sycophant, crude "social-climber", or whatever (and I recognize that not everyone finds those things so distasteful), I think it is entirely possible to network effectively and get letters without such motives. Early on after my PhD, I didn't network very effectively. Then I just started talking to people at conferences, without any real motive except to get over my shyness and try to be more open! I also met people in other ways. For instance, I applied and was accepted t0 a NEH summer institute in political philosophy, and simply had a great time. The organizers were really great guys, and so at the end of the seminar I simply asked them if they'd be willing to write a letter. They did!

A couple of my other letters came about in similarly unsought, serendipitous ways. When I published my paper on free will, the journal gave me the option of giving ten "colleagues" free access to the publication. Since I hardly knew anyone in the discipline at that point (seriously!), I put in the email of someone who had been a previous professor of mine long ago, whose work I always admired, and whose work actually inspired my paper a bit. I thought, "Hmm...I wonder what they would think of this piece?" Lo and beyond, a couple months later, I received an email from them saying they liked the article. It just so happens then that I had written a response paper to one of their other articles, so I asked if they would read it. They gave me some great feedback, was really encouraging, we exchanged some other stuff, and I've considered them a friend ever since. At some point later on, I asked if they would write a letter for the job-market, and they said yes! Another one of my letters came about in a similar war.

So, I guess that's what I would say about getting outside letters. Some people are cool with being "networkers", and such. I used to keep to myself because I didn't feel cool with that (it always felt sort of icky to me!). Fortunately, though, as I've said above, I think there are non-icky ways to go about it. You don't have to go "looking for letters" at all. Just try to make friends, engage with other people's work and have conversations with them, etc., and letters of recommendation might just be an unexpected (and unsought!) positive result. After you know someone a bit, and have a good relationship with them, if it seems appropriate to ask for a letter, ask away. The worst they can do is say no, and in my experience, this is pretty uncommon. More common, in my experience, are qualified yes answers--with the person I asked saying, "Well, I don't really work in your AOS, but I could write you a letter in terms of what I think of your work." For what it's worth, anytime anyone offered me a qualified yes of this sort, I jumped at the opportunity. It seemed to work well, at least in term of job-market results.

Anyway, these are my thoughts. Have I missed anything? Gotten anything wrong? Fire away!

Comments

[Michael Kremer]

Just a note: It may be that the person who declined your request for an updated letter was not lukewarm at all, but simply did not feel up to date with your work (and did not feel they had the time to read new work to update their letter responsibly).

[Filippo Contesi]

Thanks for all this, Marcus. It's very helpful stuff. I thought I'd add a comment from the perspective of a UK-based job hunter. We don't have placement people in the UK and so have no way, as far as I'm aware though I'd love to be proven wrong, to evaluate our letters of reference. As a matter of fact I'm concerned about my letters at the moment, as I have no way of telling what they say and stupidly forgot to ask for a "strong" letter when I asked for them two or three months ago. It looks a bit rude or awkward to approach my referees now to ask!

[Marcus Arvan]

Filippo: Interesting. I would be surprised if someone would write you a lukewarm letter without letting you know. In my experience asking people for letters, people will typically let you know if they have any concerns about the quality or relevance of the letter they will write on your behalf.

[Sam Duncan]

What do people think about letters from people who are technically not philosophers but have some serious philosophical interests? I could get very strong letters from both a political theorist I know and an economist whose interests are mostly in political philosophy. Would that be helpful or not? I thought it might be since one of my areas is political, but given the knee jerk reaction philosophy professors often have to other disciplines I wasn't sure.

[Friend of Sam]

Sam,
I think the important thing is for the letter writer to be someone whose name will be recognized. If the person has some sort regional reputation only, then their letter will count for nothing (or less). Similarly, if the letter writer is unknown to other philosophers (those reading the letter) because they are not themselves a philosopher, then it will count for nothing. If a file has letters in it that count for nothing, it tends to lead committees to think that the applicant has poor judgment. After all, you get to choose your letter writers.

[Filippo Contesi]

Thanks so much, Marcus!! Your comment matches that of a UK-educated person, so there is hope there is a wide practice of being upfront about letter quality on the part of referees. This is very reassuring for me.

[anon]

Thanks so much for this post, Marcus (and for the whole job market boot camp series, which I have personally found to be incredibly useful.)

Quick question, either for Marcus or for anyone else who may be able to answer: most job ads ask for 3 letters or more. Say you have 2 strong general letters and a strong teaching letter. Could you just use the 2 general letters and the teaching letter? Or will it look weird to not have 3 general letters? Let's suppose the ad doesn't specify -- just asks for 3 letters.

thanks in advance!

[Marcus Arvan]

Thanks for your kind words, anon.

For research jobs, send the 3 general letters.
For teaching jobs, send 2 general letters and the one teaching letter.

Simple as that! Research schools care most about research, and teaching schools care about both. Your teaching portfolio will give research schools a sufficient idea of whether you're a competent teacher, and they can always contact your teaching reference if you include it on your CV (as you should).

[anon]

Thanks, Marcus.

quick follow-up/clarification: say you've had your letters vetted and have been told your third general letter is somewhat weak -- not terrible, just not the strongest. should you still send all 3 letters to research schools? Or just 2 plus the teaching letter (assume the other 2 and the teaching letter are very strong)?

[LM]

As always, an informative and helpful post. I'm wondering how many times someone would need to observe me teach for it to be appropriate for me to ask for a teaching letter. Is one observation sufficient? Should I ask before or after the observation? Thanks!

[Asking For A Friend]

Hey Marcus,

Thank you so much for doing this series! Two quick questions re: job letters:

(1) Would an ancient person getting a letter from a (reasonably famous) classicist be a plus, a minus, or neither? (Say hypothetically this ancient person took a grad seminar with the classicist and has them on their committee.)

(2) In applying for teaching jobs, if one's best teaching letter would come from a long-term NTT person with virtually no fame in the field, should one scrap that letter? Use it in addition to a teaching letter from a more famous person? Just go with it alone?

[Marcus Arvan]

@Asking for a Friend: Thanks for the kind words - glad you've found it helpful!

On (1), it seems to me like it would be helpful. I will say that, at least anecdotally, that more and more people that I know seem to be skeptical of the value of recommendation letters in general. Letters are so inflated these days that it can be hard to know what to make of them, and it's not always clear how well what they say tracks merit/promise/accomplishment/likelihood of succeeding if hired. But, that being said, to whatever extent that letters play a positive role, I suspect a letter from a noted classicist might be helpful.

On (2), I'm not entirely sure, but my anecdotal sense is that with teaching letters, it's really the content that matters, not so much who wrote it. Further, when it comes to content, my sense is that what matters is not even so much whether the person thinks you are a *good* instructor, but rather the *picture* of your teaching that they paint. That is, my sense is that a good teaching letter will describe in vivid detail how your classroom works and what they observed (i.e. how you engaged with students, how students react to your pedagogical choices, etc.). I actually think this might be worth discussing more on the blog, and I plan to run a post on it tomorrow!

Anyway, hope you find this helpful. I'd also be happy to share your questions on the blog's main page if you'd like more responses than you are likely to get on this thread (given how old this thread is). So, if you'd like for me to do that, just let me know!