Then I had my friend Dave write my third letter, which was kind of a strange way to go about it. The third person they want to be an extracurricular supervisor. Dave is my friend, so he's a peer, but the way I positioned it was by saying that Dave is an entrepreneur, and I've consulted with him on the side with his start-up. I got him to write about how I had gone the extra mile and helped with his start-up for free. He also had the perspective of a friend so that he could talk about me as a real person.
That was my combination for Harvard. Stanford makes it a little easier, they actually want a peer recommender. In that case I went with a good friend of mine who I had done some work on the side with, while I was working.
I prepared a ten page powerpoint presentation for each of my recommenders. I would also suggest doing something like having coffee with them and talking to them a little more to give them a feel for your personality, although I actually didn't follow through on that idea myself.
I made a powerpoint because I'm a consultant, it's what I do. The intro slide was logistics, what the due dates were, where they needed to send the information, here's the website where you upload it all, and such. The second slide was requesting a sit down, saying that I would love to sit down with them and have them interview me and ask me questions once they had given the recommendation some thought. One of them took me out to lunch, the partner, so that he could get to know me. It was a way of saying that it wasn't on them alone, that we were going to work through it together.The rest of the powerpoint presentation was one slide per recommender question. The recommendations are not just an open piece of paper for them to write-- it's five targeted questions with short answer. The bullets were my recommended answer for them, from their perspective, like a set of talking points. Finally as an appendix for my two recommenders who were at my consulting firm, I provided a list, here's a reminder of all the cases I've worked on in case you want to draw on that.
I hounded my recommenders to get them done. I actually chose the partner recommender over another partner just because I knew he was more on top of things. There was another partner who would have written just as good of a recommendation, but I knew that he wasn't as reliable. So there's no specific advice that I would give beyond that you have to get in their faces and remind them to write. Do it nicely and respectfully, but do it.
One thing I forgot to mention: misconceptions and myths. There's one about letters of recommendation. Tell your recommenders to really talk about who you are as a person, and choose recommenders who can talk about that. I was tempted to ask the CEO of the startup I had worked at to be one of my recommenders, but one of the questions is to talk about how the person has taken feedback and changed over the course of your relationship.
That guy could have talked about my work, since he was the CEO of a pretty high profile startup, but he didn't really know me as a person, and he definitely didn't know me over time, only for three months. So that was a situation where I decided to go with a more traditional recommender who had known me longer, the partner at the consulting firm.
We're often tempted to go after recommenders with a high pedigree, but I don't think it's as helpful as one who really knows you and can write a personal recommendation for you.
