Letters of recommendation

 

Hello,

Welcome to my letter of recommendation site. Please read the entire page before emailing me. I am always happy to write letters for students, but please make sure you follow the required steps to ensure that I write as good of a letter as I can and meet any required deadlines.

You should always try to ask for letters as early as you can. I generally write letters of recommendation around the 15th day of every month, except for the months of April and December. Please email me first and then submit the required material by the 5th of the month (earlier is better). For example, you should email me by March 5th if you need a letter to be written around March 15th and submitted by March 22nd.

If you need a letter in April or December, you should ask me by the 15th deadline in March/April (or May/January). Once I have written a letter for you I can upload it within a week. If you are applying to medical or law school, I can submit letters to the centralized system for as many schools as you wish within a week. However, if you are applying to programs that require individual submissions for each school (ex: Econ PhD or master’s degrees), I can do 20 per month per student at most (otherwise, I don’t have enough time to submit letters for everyone else). If you are applying to more than 20 programs, that is fine, but I would need to submit the second batch on the following month.  If you are taking a gap year (or going to another program such as the Peace Corps) it is better to ask for a letter before you leave so that there isn’t a large gap between when you took my class and when I wrote your letter (I can always upload them when they are needed once I’ve written them).

Requirements/Steps

  1. Email me asking if I can write you a letter of recommendation. Please make sure you did well in my class before emailing me.
  2. Email me your filled out FERPA release and fill out this form.
  3. If applying for an Economics PhD program only (this does not apply to Master’s degrees), it is recommended that you take the following math courses: Calculus 1, 2, and 3, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra. If you have not taken all of these classes, I can still write you a letter but I will not be able to rate you as well prepared for Ph.D. programs because you cannot be well prepared for these programs without the required math courses.
  4. Send me a list of schools you are applying to with due dates.
  5. I will email you when I’ve completed your letter and submitted it to each school/job. If you don’t hear back from me within a week of your request (after I’ve told you the letter is ready), please email me to check on the status of the letter upload. I don’t want to miss any deadlines (sometimes messages are marked as spam).
  6. I can only write a good letter if you did well in my class. If you did not do well in my class, I will be honest with you and notify you of why I can’t write you a good letter.
  7. This is not a requirement, but I would really appreciate it if you would let me know the outcome of your application (you can send me an email with an update). Students often times ask me for advise about where to apply and having a list of outcomes (without student names obviously), is useful for when I try to tell students where to apply. Here’s a list of where recent students from the Economics Department have been accepted.