How to write effective letters for your mentees

Application season is in full swing! Maybe your week went something like this? You are packing away your laptop after teaching class. One of your students approaches you to ask if you would be willing to write them a letter of recommendation for a scholarship. When you get back to your office after a committee meeting, you check your email and find requests for graduate school recommendations from two of your undergraduate researchers. Later in the day, you discuss a fellowship opportunity with one of your graduate students and they will need a letter from you as well.

Does this sound familiar? As educators and mentors, we want to support and advocate for our students as they seek opportunities to advance in their education and careers. Questions have been raised about benefits and limitations of letters of reference, and there is disagreement among experts about the role letters of recommendation should play in admission, award, and hiring decisions (e.g., Gottlieb et al., 2023; Kuncel et al., 2014; Madera et al., 2019; Woo et al., 2023). However, they remain a necessary component of many application processes. Writing effective, unbiased letters for our mentees is critical to their success. Here we offer some tips for how to write letters that are both effective and unbiased.

Your letter should focus on helping decision-makers formulate a more complete picture of your mentee than can be built from their submission alone. Ideally, you will have your mentee’s CV and other application materials to reference when you are writing so that you can reinforce and augment their statements about themselves as well as provide additional context for and evaluation of your mentee. Letters are likely  to be more effective when they:

• follow instructions provided to letter writers;
• are tailored specifically to the program or institution;
• include a clear description of your relationship with your mentee, including how long you have known them and in what capacity;
• include a clear statement of your support of your mentee;
• include specific examples of how your mentee has developed or demonstrated the behaviors and/or traits that you are highlighting about them; and
• highlight your mentee’s strengths, ways they have worked to improve, and potential for future contributions and success.

To best support your mentees’ applications, the accomplishments you choose to include in your letters and the language you choose for your descriptions should also be as free from bias as possible (Dutt et al., 2016; Houser & Lemmons, 2018; Madera et al., 2009, 2019). Letters of recommendation are less biased when they:

• emphasize specific professional behaviors or traits over vague personality descriptors (e.g., caring, dependable, warm, helpful);
• emphasize scholarship, leadership, and achievement;
• include more strong, stand-out adjectives (e.g., excellent, confident, independent, resourceful);
• emphasize accomplishment over effort; and
• focus on the professional context (e.g., research, skills, accomplishments) and avoid sharing aspects of your mentee’s personal life (unless they have given you permission and instruction to do so).

To check for bias, consider pasting the text of your letter into this gender bias calculator tool. The results may surprise you! One caveat about this tool is that certain fields (e.g., education), roles (e.g., teaching assistant), behaviors (mentoring), and traits (conscientiousness) are coded as female associated, while others are male associated (e.g., science, researcher, skills, best). Research has shown that male-associated terms – so called “standout” words – are favorably evaluated by admission and selection committees (Schmader et al., 2008). The results will help you recognize and consider whether your letter would benefit from including more standout terms.

Before you click “submit” on your next letter, reread it with these questions in mind:

• Have you followed the directions provided to you?
• Have you clearly described your relationship to your mentee and stated your support for their application?
• Have you provided examples that focus on professional, rather than personal, actions and accomplishments as well as on research and skills?
• Have you used standout terms and avoided descriptors that could be interpreted as stereotypes?
• Have you written about as much to describe this mentee as you have for comparable mentees in the past?

These guidelines are most helpful when you are writing on behalf of a mentee whom you know well and who has clearly demonstrated their aptitude and potential. What can you do when you are asked to write on behalf of someone you don’t feel well equipped to support? 

Based on your experience with a mentee or student, you may not feel like you can write a compelling letter. Perhaps you see more areas for growth than strengths. If so, it is ok to say no and encourage them to find someone who knows them well and speak to their strengths. It may also be helpful to keep in mind that we can’t predict the future and in the right context with the right support, the student may really blossom. 

Before saying “no,” it is important to consider that students may be in a tough spot. For instance, students are sometimes required to have a letter from a faculty member, but they may not have taken many courses or the courses they have taken may have been large, with limited opportunities to interact with faculty. This makes it difficult to identify a letter writer who is willing and able to write a compelling letter. In this situation, it can be helpful to ask the student to provide information you can use to craft your letter. For instance, many professional schools (medical, dental, nursing, law, etc.) specify competencies they are seeking in applicants. You can encourage students to select two of the competencies important for their program or career of interest. Then ask them to write a brief paragraph for each, explaining their level of competence and giving one or two specific examples of when, where, and how they have demonstrated that competency.

In case your efforts to write compelling letters have not been acknowledged, thank you for all you are doing to advocate for your mentees and other students!

Here are some additional resources for writing letters that are more effective and less biased:

• Better Letters: Equitable Practices for Writing, Reading, and Soliciting Letters of Recommendation (Equity in Graduate Education, University of Southern California)
• Reviewing Applicants: Research on Bias and Assumptions (Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute, University of Wisconsin, Madison)
• Resources for Teachers: Writing Letters of Recommendation (Comparative Media Studies | Writing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Do you have other ideas about how to best advocate for mentees in letters of recommendation? Email us at contact_c-comp@whoi.edu – your input may be the focus of a future blog post!

If you are interested in learning more about evidence-based practices related to undergraduate research and mentorship, please check out our other blog posts in this series (listed below) and stay tuned for future blog posts!

1. Who gets to do undergraduate research?
2. New researchers have arrived-now what?
3. How do you know what your mentee knows?
4. How do I set my mentee up for success in research?
5. How do you support mentee independence in research?
6. How can we provide effective feedback to our mentees?
7. How can we design research environments to be more accessible?
8. Considerations in choosing an inclusive conference location
9. How to mentor early career researchers in making and presenting posters

About the Authors

Dr. Victoria Centurino is a Senior Marine Education Specialist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and C-CoMP’s Education Coordinator.

Dr. Erin Dolan is a professor of biochemistry & molecular biology, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Georgia Athletic Association Professor of Innovative Science Education at the University of Georgia as well as C-CoMP’s Career Development Coordinator.

References

Dutt, K., Pfaff, D. L., Bernstein, A. F., Dillard, J. S., & Block, C. J. (2016). Gender differences in recommendation letters for postdoctoral fellowship in geoscience. Nature Geoscience, 9, 805-808. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2819.  

Gottlieb, M., Boatright, D., & Landry, A. (2024). Letters of reference in the current era. Academic Medicine, 99(9), 942. doi: https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000005775. 

Houser, C. & Lemmons, K. (2018). Implicit bias in letters of recommendation for an undergraduate research internship. J Furth High Edu 42, 585-595. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2017.1301410. 

Jaschik, S. (2018). Recommendation Letters and Bias in Admissions. Inside Higher Ed. 

Madera, J. M.,  Hebl, M. R., Dial, H., & Valian, V. (2019). Raising doubt in letters of recommendation for academia: Gender differences and their impact. Journal of Business and Psychology, 34(3), 287-303. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-018-9541-1. 

Madera, J. M., Hebl, M. R., & Martin, R. C. (2009). Gender and letters of recommendation for academia: Agentic and communal differences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(6), 1591-1599. doi: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016539.