Letter of recommendation for applications

Ideas and Inspiration
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I’m working on a grant application and that’s why I wanted to post on this topic of letters of recommendation/support. I definitely know a lot of people who write their own letters without involving the candidate requesting recommendation letters, but also had a lot of people asking for drafts at least as writing a letter does require time and you wanna do justice to the candidate’s accomplishments that you may not necessarily be aware of. So nothing against that. But, when you’re working on your grant application and also have to write a bunch of letters of recommendations pretending you’re different people, it does get a bit challenging. Or at least I find it challenging!

I was wondering if you have tips! When I applied for a large grant requiring 9 letters from different people, I actually made my friends write letters so they could all sound different (one really does run out of adjectives to praise themselves pretty quickly). Now, I’m actually bringing AI into the mix, my friends are too exhausted of praising me and doing work without pay :rofl: I don’t just copy and paste from AI without incorporating my own edits, and don’t feed any project related info into AI so the letters end up looking pretty generic but I’m just out of recommendation letter praises for myself and need help…

What do you all do? Curious to hear thoughts and experiences!

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My first thought was that your particular situation seems more of an outlier than the rule? :slight_smile:

In my case, most of the things I apply to mostly never really require more than 3 letters, and usually only 2. In these cases honestly I just have my own template and I’m always able to have a slightly different initial/ending text for each, and for the actual content I actually don’t mind having them repeating the same thing when I think it’s important (given most people probably spend very little time reading these letters, a bit of repetition is probably not bad).

The other thing that I try is that at least there’s always one or two paragraphs on each letter that mention different things. For example with one person we wrote a specific paper, with another we co-taught a course, etc. So, more than the style, some of the content is also different, ultimately sounding different and more personal.

Good luck with all those applications! Ultimately from my side I guess I just don’t see much of a problem in having some repetitions! :smiley:

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NIH grants like zillions of letters :slight_smile: the reference + mentor/collaborator/consultant + department chair letters add up real quick! such a good idea to have a template, definitely right about reviewers not spending that much time reading the letters so this is a really good perspective!!! uber appreciated!!!