Hello. I want to apply to graduate schools but professors in my school are advised not to write recommendation letters to universities outside a specific country. I asked my former professors and I got a positive response but kindly notifying that they should not be writing it, and the other ones just hedged and ran away when I went to the department event to try to talk to them. My school is fairly prestigious and considered the best in my country.
I didn’t know that this was the policy in my school, and I would like to know which of the following options seem better:
Going to a not so prestigious graduate school abroad that doesn’t require recommendation letters and getting a degree there, so that I can get recommendation letters from there.
Going to graduate school in my previous school (where I don’t need recommendation letters to enter either) and try to persuade my professors, no matter what their policy is, with the risk of not getting the recommendation letters after 3 years of study but with a slight chance of getting them from a prestigious school.
This is a very odd situation. Do graduate students from your university never go to graduate school outside of the country?
I’m not sure that either of these would work. I don’t think staying for graduate school at your university would convince your professors to write you a letter if your current school’s policy doesn’t change, and you run the risk of spending 2-3 years of studying for nothing. So I think you should rule this one out.
On the other hand, I’m not aware of any reputable graduate programs (that would be worth the time and money) that don’t require recommendation letters, at least in the U.S. If they do exist, though, this would probably be your best bet.
Ask your professors whether they have had any students go to graduate school outside of the country, and how those students have handled this problem. If that doesn’t work, I’d talk to a dean or whoever administers academic affairs at your university.
If neither of those work, what might be a good bet is trying to get a research position at an institution where you can work with a couple of PIs.
This really does seems weird. Doing grad school abroad is essentially, letting another country pay most of the costs of your graduates school, helps build international partnerships, and also reduces competitions between students in their own country. China, for example, has a whole system to help as many students as possible get into grad schools outside of China.
Have you worked with any professors from outside your university? Otherwise, as @juillet proposed, you’ll likely need to work at a research institution or at another university which doesn’t have this weird policy, and then get recommendations from people there.
Alternatively, if there are other universities without this weird policy, you can do a Masters at one of them, and then apply for your PhD abroad.
I also think that this is odd. Reference letters are very important for graduate admissions in North America.
Personally I took a two year gap between getting my bachelor’s and returning to graduate school. All of my reference letters for graduate school were from people who I worked for (including my boss and his boss). This is one thing that you could do. However, working for two years just to get references seems rather drastic. I was also in the fortunate position that my boss’ boss was a professor, which of course would not be true for most jobs.
I agree this is unusual- it made the national news when professors at the U of Michigan refused to write a rec letter to a school in Israel as part of a boycott against policies there. The OP should talk to the DGS to learn about whatever policies the profs might be referring to in his department.
This sounds like the sort of thing that might be expected out of a country like Hungary where you have programs designed to keep domestic students domestic and a borderline autocratic government willing to do whatever they can to make it happen.
I don’t really know the answer about how to get around this because it seemingly really will depend on the political nature of the country in question and what has led to the situation.
I ran into a similar problem in North America. I was moving and my son was applying to a private school in our new location from a public school in our old location. The public schools had the same rule - the union for the public school teachers didn’t allow their teachers to write references. We got around it by having the admissions office of the new school phoning the principal of the old school. See if the professors who gave you a positive reply are open to receiving a phone call.
@bouders, do you know how the students from the private school managed to get into college? Was the principal fielding calls all fall from colleges?
I understand why institutions might want to do this (they believe it limits their legal liability - a lot of employers do it too) but especially for educational institutions where every step of the way requires recommendations, it seems like an unnecessarily hard line.
@juillet It was an elementary public school teachers union that wouldn’t write references. The high schools in the same system had no problems with writing references for college.
This doesn’t make sense. Go to the Dean of students, or to the head of your department, or someone in a position of authority and explain why you need letters of rec.
Or, you need to consider that they may not want to write letters for you. If so, why? Did you work hard and get good grades?