Keep a watchful eye on your professors.
There’s nothing more stressful than the graduate school application process. You have to worry about your grades in class, admissions exam scores, personal statements, résumés and the actual applications themselves. The last thing you want to do is keep on top of someone to make sure they’re doing their part as well. Unfortunately, it seems you have to.
I’m in the midst of the law school application process, so obviously I need a letter of recommendation. I’ve asked two of my professors. One promptly had the letter submitted to the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), the organization responsible for collecting and distributing application materials to each school, before the end of the holiday season. The other letter has yet to materialize.
I asked this professor to write me a letter of recommendation in early November, hoping it would be ready to mail out before Thanksgiving. I was told that it would be done, and with a relieved sigh I put a check mark next to this item on my mental to-do list.
A week after I was told the letter was sent out, I was informed by LSAC that it hadn’t been received. A few days after informing my professor of this, I was told it would be re-sent out. That copy wasn’t received by LSAC either. This process repeated itself until the beginning of this semester. I was at my wit’s end.
At this point, it seems like there’s only so much you can do. You don’t want to annoy a professor who’s supposed to be doing you a favor by writing the letter in the first place. But you can’t just let them get away with flaking on you. What to do?
I opted to send a few e-mails at the beginning of the semester. No response. I sought out the professor during office hours. No help there. I had enough of playing nice.
I went and spoke to people in the department who left word with my professor about the urgency of my situation and that I needed to be contacted immediately.
At this point, I decided to contact another professor to write me a letter to fill this void. He came to my rescue, and his letter was written, sent out, received and processed in under a week. I still have yet to hear from the other professor, and I doubt I ever will.
What does this say about our educators when they can’t keep a promise to complete something by a specified time, or at all?
As students, we are expected to have everything done by its due date or we are penalized, usually in the form of a bad grade. But there are some professors who can’t do the same thing they require of us, and since we have almost no tangible way of penalizing them, it seems as though we’ve found an unjust double standard in our system.
Granted, most professors deliver what they promise. The problem is that you can’t tell the reliable from the unreliable until you’re already in a sticky situation. Between the stress of classes, applications and looming uncertainty, dealing with a professor who doesn’t keep his/her word is just plain cruel. Wouldn’t it be easier if they just said they couldn’t get the job done in the first place?
It seems as though the old cliché is true: you can’t listen to what people say, you have to watch what they do.