Every time I return to my office these days, another request for a letter of recommendation has appeared in my office mail box, under my door, or in my e-mail. Although they can be a lot of work, I certainly don't mind writing such letters for my students. It's a way of paying back my professors for doing me the favor years ago.
I've been amazed at how far into the past I am asked to trek on behalf of students I taught many semesters and even many institutions ago. I always warn those students that if I can't remember their names, I won't be able to provide them with good letters. Most of them beg me to write one anyway.
For some students, it's an honor to be asked. Just recently I wrote one for a student who was, without a doubt, the best creative writer I have taught in all my years in the classroom. Words of praise flew from my fingertips into my word processor without hesitation. Whenever I write a glowing letter, I flash back to an incident a few years ago when I wrote one for another exemplary student.
On that occasion, I had spent the better part of a week working my way through a stack of recommendation requests from students, trying to find novel ways to articulate their individual talents and abilities on the forms provided by the doctoral programs the students hoped to attened.
As I filled out the forms for a particularly talented student, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a strong sense of déjà vu. At first, I thought it was because I had written a few too many of these letters, but then I recognized that the form I was filling out had a distinctive green ink, as did the envelope. Realization dawned: The form was from an institution that had rejected my own application to its doctoral program more than 10 years ago.
Quickly, I flipped through the stack of requests and found another vaguely familiar envelope, this time from a university that had turned down my application for a tenure-track opening.
Here I was recommending students to programs for which I myself had been deemed not good enough. I had to laugh out loud at the irony.
Rejection is one of those things that becomes commonplace once you've been through the various academic meat grinders: the graduate-school application process, the tenure-track job market, and the peer-review system. Having made it successfully through all three gantlets, all of the rejections I experienced along the way have become only vague memories buried beneath the happiness of having a "real" job doing what I love: teaching literature.
While speculation is pretty useless, it's hard not to wonder as I think back on the rejections: Why didn't those departments see my potential?
I have to remind myself that I was a terrible student as an undergraduate, lazy and undisciplined. In fact, I spent my freshman year on academic probation. By my senior year, I had made my way to the dean's list but it was a come-from-behind struggle the entire way.
My transcripts, however, effectively blocked me from most graduate programs. To get into a program, I had to return to one of my professors after more than five years had elapsed to ask her for a letter of recommendation. She actually laughed out loud: "Oh, I remember you all right. What makes you think you belong in a graduate program?"
I explained to her how seriously I'd begun to take my studies and showed her my more recent transcripts. She reluctantly agreed to write the letter and sent me away with a parting comment: "If they let you in, just remember this: Don't embarrass us, OK?" I would be scared to know what her letter said, but it couldn't have hurt much, as I was admitted to my preferred graduate program.
Graduate school was like an academic boot camp for me, complete with deconstructist push-ups and Marxist hikes. I became a lean, mean thinking machine, devouring critical works and refining my rhetorical style. When I completed my Ph.D., I couldn't help looking back on my 1.8 grade-point average in my freshman year and being thankful for those professors who had overlooked my academic record and given me a chance to prove myself.
I am not what I was when I first applied for graduate school or even when I applied for my first tenure-track teaching position. I suppose that I have continued to play catch-up as I've built my career. I am now chairman of another English department that passed me over when I first applied for an entry-level, assistant-professor position 10 years ago.
In the end, though, who cares about rejection? I've done OK, and I love my job. I have decided to soothe any lingering sense of self-doubt with this balm: In the recommendation forms and letters that I now send on behalf of students to the places that turned me down, I like to include a business card with my full title and the university logo. That's my bit of self-affirmation.
By the way, I take great pleasure in knowing that that institution with the green ink not only accepted my student, but gave him a full fellowship. I'm pretty certain that his almost perfect score on standardized tests and his 4.0 GPA with a difficult double-major had more to do with his acceptance than did the recommendation from his professor, who came nowhere near either accomplishment as an undergraduate. Then again, I taught him in several of those courses that prepared him for those standardized tests -- another bit of affirmation.
Today, as I write recommendations, I try to extend the benefit of the doubt from which I so profited to my current students -- the ones who have had a bad semester or who have only recently awakened from an undergraduate fog.
In the letters I write on their behalf, I use terms like "serious potential" and "ready to be energized by an enthusiastic graduate program." What I really mean is: "I see a lot of myself in this student; give her a break!"
