 Hello, my people, my name is Beacham. I'm your college counselor, and this is a letter of recommendation that I wrote for one of my students. And today I'm gonna share with you five tips that you can use to get the best letters of recommendation possible. But I've also got five tips for your teachers, so I want you to share this video with your teachers and pay attention. Tip number one for students is for you to choose the right teachers. The teachers that you select for your recommendation letters are extremely important for your admission process. You should always have one teacher related to your major, so if you wanna study engineering, you should definitely have a letter from your math or physics teacher. If you wanna study medicine, get your biology or chemistry teacher to give you a letter of recommendation. A lot of times this is a requirement for programs when you wanna study abroad, so you need to make sure that you have at least one letter related to your major. Many universities allow you to send more than one letter of recommendation, so who else should you ask? Ask the teacher that knows you the longest from high school, so if you have one teacher who's taught you for three or four years, that could be a great person to ask. They can talk a lot about your growth and development in their course and over time. And you should also ask your favorite teacher or maybe the teacher whose class has your best grades. Your favorite teacher will probably have good chemistry with you and if you're getting good grades in a class, your teacher's probably gonna write positive things, so that's a good way to get three quality letters. However, my first tip for teachers is that you should not say yes to everyone. You are under no obligation to write letters of recommendation for students, and in fact, if you don't feel that you can write a good letter of recommendation for a student that asks you, say no. My second piece of advice for students is to reduce your chances of getting a no from your teacher by asking early. I'm recording this right now in September. This video is going up in September. You need to be applying to the US early in October, so if you haven't asked your teacher already, you really need to do that now. So teachers, if you decide to say yes, what should you put in your letter? Well, that brings me to my second tip for you, which is in your first paragraph, you need to explain your relationship to the student. Tell the university how long you've known the student, what class you teach, how many hours a week that class is, and what your student's performance is relative to other students that you've taught. Say, okay, this student is in the top 10% of all the students I've ever taught, or this student is the best in this class, or this student is above average. You wanna give some sort of qualification to let the university know more or less where this student sits in your experience as a teacher. You may wanna add how long you've been teaching to give a frame of reference, because obviously the best student I've ever taught has a lot more weight when you've been teaching for 20 years versus just two. After you've explained that relationship with your student, we gotta talk about tip number three, which is for you to use concrete examples when you talk about your student. The biggest mistake I see in recommendation letters is just listing adjectives, you know? It's like Johnny's responsible and very proactive and very intelligent. Adjectives don't mean anything. Examples mean everything. Pick one of those adjectives and think about a time where that student demonstrated that to you. So if I wanna say that Johnny's proactive, I could talk about how he came to my office and told me that he was gonna be on vacation for two weeks a month in advance and asked me to show the syllabus and see exactly what we would cover in each of the classes that were coming up during his vacations and if there would be any homework and what exam content he would have to study for that he was going to miss, that's the kind of thing that a proactive person does. And when I explain that, the university is gonna see that this person really is responsible and proactive instead of me just describing them that way. As your teachers write this, you may feel compelled to want to see this letter of recommendation for yourself. And that's my third tip for students is to respect your teacher's privacy. Your teacher is under no obligation to show you that letter or give it to you directly at all. And while I do encourage teachers to be transparent, I typically show my letters to students. I don't change them for the student but I show them, I'll say, this is what I think about you. This is what I wrote for you. If you wanna use this in your applications, be my guest. If you don't like it, hey, this is how I feel. But don't pressure your teachers to give you their letter if they don't want to. In fact, privacy is actually something that's taken into consideration on your applications in the common app. When you go to submit your letters, you're gonna see that there's something called a FERPA waiver. FERPA is a law that basically gives students the right to access information about their educational profile. And so this letter would technically qualify for that by waiving your FERPA rights. What you're saying is, I'm not going to have access to these letters. I'm not going to see what's in them. If you don't waive those FERPA rights, then the universities might assume that you were collaborating with your teacher to try to make a perfect letter of recommendation. Which brings me to my fourth point for teachers, talk about a weakness. You don't want to just write a perfect, sterling letter of recommendation for your student, nobody is perfect. Can you identify a weakness that your student has improved over time or is taking steps to address? Universities want to see real people in the admissions process and nothing is more real than being imperfect. My fifth tip for teachers is to make it personal. Another big mistake that I see in recommendation letters is keeping it strictly academic, strictly related to the confines of the classroom. And the truth is, many of us teachers have relationships with our students beyond the classroom. We talk in the halls, we see each other at recess, sometimes we have lunch together or meet for study sessions. And those moments are really where relationships are made and that is where you can share a really personal detail about your student that can stand out in the admissions process. To give you an example of this, I want to talk about Raul. Now that's his real name. Raul was one of my students and academically speaking, he was an average student. There really wasn't much positivity to highlight there academically. I did focus on the fact that he did make a lot of efforts to get feedback from me and tried to improve his work because he knew a lot of times that his work wasn't great, but he would do multiple iterations to get it to the point where it was decent. And I respected that a lot because it shows awareness and it shows a sense of responsibility. So I highlighted that in my letters. Obviously I couldn't talk about him being a great student because he wasn't. I love you Raul, but you weren't. But I wanted to focus on something personal about Raul that actually touched me a lot. And it was the fact that his younger brother has cerebral palsy and it makes it difficult for him to speak and move around in the classroom and handle certain tasks by himself. And I taught his younger brother for the last hour of every week, the very last class on Friday, I would be with Raul's younger brother. And at the end of every single week that year, Raul would be waiting at the door, waiting for the last bell to ring so that he could help his brother pack up his bag and walk him down the stairs carefully. And his brother took forever to get out of the class. I mean, Raul would always be the last one to leave the school. And when I would see that, it just said a lot to me about Raul and who he is as a person. Like that is someone who is genuinely loving and caring. And you could say, well, hey, that's his brother, that's his family, but like, I certainly wasn't that nice with my sister at that age. So I just respect the hell out of Raul for the way that he treated his brother and how supportive he was. And seeing that, that was how I ended every week of work for a whole year. It left an impression on me. And I decided to include that in his letter of recommendation. He got admitted to the best university in the Netherlands despite not having impressive grades at all. These letters do make a difference. Tip number four for students is to make sure that you add your recommenders on the common app. Your teachers don't send the letters directly to the universities in most cases. Normally you're going to upload them on common app by adding that teacher as a recommender. And once the teacher completes the upload process, then you will have a finished recommendation that you can add to any of your applications. You don't have to use the same teacher for all of your applications. You can mix and match. You can choose the best one that you think you have. Bonus tip for teachers, don't be so formal. I see this mistake all the time where the teacher feels like they need to speak to the university representative as if they were the president or something like this illustrious and prestigious institution that you work at all hail your university. You're speaking to your peers. Most of these people who read these letters in admissions are young adults. Most of them are between 25 and 45. And many of them have worked in education in other capacities. They're not that different from you. Obviously you want to be respectful, but you can be casual. You can write the way you normally speak. And in fact, I think most admissions officers would actually appreciate that more as opposed to a lot of the really formal professional letters that they get that ultimately take away a little bit from the personality of the teacher and the student. And if you've gotten that far and you're able to apply, then tip number five is probably the most important. Say thank you to your teachers. Go up to your teachers and say thank you for writing that letter of recommendation for me and helping me get it in on time. And maybe, you know, consider leaving them a little something for their trouble. Remember that your teachers are doing you a favor and they are extremely busy people who are often underpaid. So they're doing you a favor. Be nice to your teachers. Say thank you. If you want to see some letters of recommendation, I have left a link in the description of this video to a folder where you can go ahead and look at some of the letters that I have written for my students. And if you're a teacher watching this, then I hope those examples can help guide you. I'm not saying that my letters are the only way to write a letter, but definitely I know they've gotten some good results and I want to share them with you. I appreciate you a lot. All the work that you do for your students means everything without you. This whole thing of applying abroad doesn't happen. So you ultimately have one of the most important roles in the entire process. And so I thank you for your participation in that role and I thank you for wanting to do it to the best of your ability. There is no more construction next door, which means I can record a video right now on a Friday morning instead of having to wait till Sunday when I'm dog tired, don't want to do anything but just sit on the couch and play video games. So I'm extremely happy. I'm going to be making more videos for the channel now, getting back into my rhythm a little bit. We got a lot of work to do for this application cycle. So let's get moving.