You, perhaps, have had less experience asking for letters of recommendation than I have had writing them. Let me share.

You may or may not need a meaningful letter.

If, for example, you're applying to something that isn't really competitive, where they're really only asking for a pro formal letter (to teach an ExCo course, to enroll in the Sex at Sea Semester, or whatever), you only need something that looks like a real letter. In these cases, I will ask you to "staff" the process by preparing for me a draft of a letter that I might view as the first stab at a letter that I subsequently would write.

If you're applying to something that is competitive, you need a real letter and one that is very supportive. If you need such a letter that's what you should consider asking for and, if you do, I'll tell you whether I can write it.

For guidance on whether or not to ask, you should know that, as a practical matter, I usually do not feel that I know enough to write a very supportive letter unless we've already had two courses together. It's not that that is a requirement and there surely are exceptions. It's just that, to acquire the ammunition that I can shoot in a very supportive letter, it usually takes the sort of personal interaction that happens over a couple of courses.

Since all human interactions are transactions, here's what you must agree to, once I agree to write a very supportive letter.

Conditions To Which You Agree

1. You will complete fully all factual parts of any required forms. Quite astoundingly, I sometimes receive incomplete forms, where students, applying for schools of public management even, simply skip over required questions. This obviously slows down your letter (and adds to my transaction costs).

2. You will waste your time printing my name, title, etc., rather than count on me to waste my time. Check out the forms; they often call for my printed or typed name, title, name of institution, phone number etc. YOU will complete this factual material as well. Your failure to do this may cause a delay that affects you adversely.

3. Every form will be attached to a pre-addressed, stamped envelope.

4. In so far as possible, you will send me all the forms and all the requests at once.

5. You will provide me with a typed list of 3-5 adjectives or adjectival phrases that capture some of your distinctive strengths, specifically those that I've seen and that you think THEY want to hear about.

6. For each of these "strengths," you also will provide me with a brief anecdote that illustrates that particular strength; this example also should be something I observed in our work together (or plausibly could have observed).

7. You will, in person or over the telephone (NOT through e-mail), give me a heads-up telephone message, alerting me to the need to get your letters out, EXACTLY 3 days before they need to go into a (regular delivery) USPS mail box.

By the way and just in case the above conditions sound burdensome, I am happy to write as many individualized letters as you need and to do so myself, rather than sending you to some centralized College service that rips you off for a copy of a standardized letter.

The above seven conditions are the only conditions. There is one additional insight I would like to share with you, however. This is NOT a condition for writing on your behalf; it's just a lesson you may profit from learning. It's actually a corollary of one of the more basic public policy lessons; namely, "It's never over." The corollary, in the context of getting a letter, is: "Close the loop." This means two things.

First, you should let me know what happens; doing so says a lot about you, especially when you don't get what you were hoping for.

Second, I may be better able to help another student if I know what happened to you.

So, unless you plan on climbing the ladder of social progress and then pulling it up behind you, close the loop, please.