Which teachers should I ask for a recommendation from? How should I ask?

Shrmpngrtz
Fri, 19 May 2017 01:00:23 +0000

@mangoeslover So, the physics teacher question is a bit tricky. You are considering a neuroscience major, but I don’t think your ECs reflect that, right? IMHO, students who list three prospective majors in three completely different fields are called “undecided”. Many applicants seem to think that being undecided is automatically a negative. It’s not. Undecided because you are clueless, lazy and/or apathetic is bad, but that doesn’t sound like you.

With that said, have you looked at a Common App teacher recommendation? You should. Fair warning though because it’s a little intimidating. My son freaked out a little when he first saw it, because it forced him to rethink his plans for teacher recs. Duke has a sample one from a few years back on its admissions website.

http://admissions.duke.edu/images/uploads/process/teacher_evaluation.pdf

After looking through it, ask yourself - who is going to do the best job filling it out? Those are the people who you should consider asking first. I think an excellent recommendation from one of your other teachers will always be better than an average Physics rec even if you do decide to take the neuroscience path. That’s just my opinion though - perhaps others can chime in.

Regarding your college list, most kids don’t have a final list in May of their junior year. So that’s pretty normal. To be clear, my kid asked for recommendations his junior spring, but then went to talk to each teacher in September. I apologize if that was confusing. By then, he knew exactly which colleges he was applying to one ED, one EA, 5 RD. Personally, I think it helped a lot that he had his list set when he talked to his teachers. He had done a lot of research on his schools and could really articulate why he liked each school. His math teacher was excited to talk to him about the math programs at the various schools; his FL teacher was thrilled that he was applying to Middlebury; his music teacher talked about music opportunities in Chicago. He got to talk about his passions, and it helped them to get to know him better as a person.