Asking for Letters of Recommendation??
General Information
- I am more than happy to write letters of Recommendation on behalf of you
if
- (preferred case) you have worked on a project, a thesis, and/or a dissertation under my supervision, or
- you have taken at least one course from me and received at least 80 pts.
I suggest that you find your project/thesis advisor(s) or the professor(s) who work on
the areas you are applying to write letters of
recommendation for you because such letters would look stronger if the professor(s)
can have a solid proof to comment on your research capability.
Simply commenting on your course work might not help much,
especially for some elite graduate schools.
What do I need to write the letters on behalf of you??
- your transcript (with ranking information),
- the score(s) you get from the course(s) I instructed,
- the score(s) you get from the project(s) I supervised and your project report(s),
- your resume,
- your statement of purpose,
- list of universities that you want to apply and their deadlines
(for me to trace the submissions of the letters), and
- other supporting materials (certificates, TOFLE/GRE score reports, etc).
What do you need to do with the recommendation forms?
- Fill in the sections to be completed by you and
my information as follows:
- Name: Yao-Wen Chang
- Title/position: Distinguished Professor
- Affiliation/Organization: National Taiwan University
- Department: Electrical Engineering
- Program/Area/Field: Electronic Design Automation
- Address: Dept. of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan
University, Taipei 106, Taiwan
- Tel: 886-2-3366-3556
- Fax: 886-2-2364-1972
- Email: ywchang@ntu.edu.tw
Note that please try to fill in as many fields as possible,
as doing so can save me significant time---I typically need
to write 60-100 letters of recommendation every year.
Others?
- At most 10 letters per person for those who have worked on a project, a thesis, and/or a dissertation under my supervision, or 8 letters per person
for those who have taken my courses, please.
- At least two weeks for preparation for general cases, please. Note that at least two months for those who fail to process their journal submissions, and no letter/recommendation for those who refuse to process/submit their works/reports. (The academic reputation of a lab highly depends on the continuous contribution/work generation-by-generation; every lab member has the obligation to maintain such reputation by fulfilling the duty of competing her/his work to help the next generation. It is selfish conduct refusing to complete her/his work. Note that the recommendation here includes the reference check for applying a job, typically asked by the employers.)
- I prefer to do the letters all-together, not one by one.
So you'd better make all your on-line requests on the same day. Thanks.
- ATTENTION: The first week of December is typically the paper due date of the
ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), one of the most
important events in my area. As a result, I will be fully occupied
with the paper submissions and might not have any bandwidth to
process any recommendation letters during this period. So there
are three options: 1) submit your applications and letter requests
and send me all the requested documents by November 1st, 2) request me
to write letters only for those programs not with deadlines by December 12th (preferably),
or 3) allow me to submit my letters after the DAC submission deadline
(note that it is typically okay for a recommender to submit his/her
letters then, even though the application deadline is earlier).