IF SO, PLEASE FOLLOW THESE STEPS:

•    Please provide all required forms already filled out in full, including my name and other identifying information. (Jennifer A. Steen, Assistant Professor, Political Science Department, Boston College, McGuinn 201, Chestnut Hill MA 02467, phone 617-552-6029, fax 617-552-2435, email jennifer.steen@bc.edu). Obviously I will provide my own signature, but please use a neon highlighter to indicate where my signature should go.

•    I will only return the letter to you if the school or agency requires that it be submitted with your application package. In that case I will sign my name over the flap of a BC political science department envelope. I will also include a line in the letter advising the recipient that the recommendation should be withdrawn if it is not received in such an envelope, with my signature over the flap.

•    For letters to be sent directly to the admissions or selection committee, please provide pre-addressed and stamped envelopes. Please include my return address. You can also give me a pre-printed address label if you want the letter to go out in a BC envelope.

•    You must waive your right of access to the letter. I do not write non-waived letters. This is not because I want to write bad things about my students without them reading about it! In academe, non-confidential letters carry very little weight and I do not want to invest my time and effort into tailoring an individual letter that will not even be considered seriously by the recipient.

•    If you still have any of your written assignments from my class, please give me a copy of each of them. The feedback I provided to you at the time is especially helpful.

•    If you are applying for a fellowship, internship, job or extracurricular activity, please give me a copy of the announcement of the position so I will know what qualities are especially important to the selection committee.

•    This step is optional but strongly recommended: You may remember your performance in my class much better than I do, depending on when you took the class and how many students were in it. It is very helpful to me if you prepare bullet points covering your strengths as they were evident in my course or in our interactions outside class. (I will only write about qualities I observed, and admissions committees are perfectly capable of reading your resume themselves, so please don't highlight your extracurricular activities here unless we discussed them or they otherwise had some bearing on your relationship with me.) Of these qualities, I certainly can determine which ones to play up for law school or other graduate school applications. If you are applying for a fellowship or some non-academic position, you may wish to highlight aspects of your performance or credentials that are especially relevant to your application.

•    Be sure to send me a reminder email two weeks before the due date for each letter.