Saturday 16 February 2019

Can both a grad. student & faculty member cosign a recommendation letter?


Can two people, a professor and a graduate student, sign a recommendation letter? The concern here is that the professor knows little about the student and the graduate student knows all about the student.



My concern here is that if the professor is contacted, he will not be able to provide further information, where as if I was listed as the primary contact: I could.



Answer



Like Noah, I had a situation where two advisors co-signed a letter of recommendation. I should mention that the people reviewing the letter found this an unusual situation—and had claimed that they had not seen that in twenty years of reading recommendation letters. So this is definitely not standard practice. I suspect it would be memorable, but I am not sure it would be actually useful.


However, the difference was that my two co-signers were equal in rank. Your situation has a professor with a graduate student providing most of the insights. I suspect you will need to have the professor adapt the graduate student's comments, and then sign the letter. In the case where feedback is needed, the professor would then need to get the relevant details from the graduate student.


No comments:

Post a Comment

evolution - Are there any multicellular forms of life which exist without consuming other forms of life in some manner?

The title is the question. If additional specificity is needed I will add clarification here. Are there any multicellular forms of life whic...