by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

You wrote your statement of purpose. Now, you need reference letters. The main purpose is to provide the person who wants to hire you with an impression of your work through the perspective of people you have worked with in the past.

Ask your previous advisors, managers, mentors, or even professors who taught the courses where you performed very well and whose content is aligned with your future topics of interest. If you have already written a thesis (Bachelor or Master), you should also definitely ask your advisor because they probably had enough interactions with you to know you well enough for such a letter.

Reaching out to these people might be challenging and you might feel hesitant to do it because you know that it will cause them some overhead. But they all went through it and had to ask people for references in the past, so they will understand. Additionally, you can reduce their overhead by helping them with the reference letter: Therefore, prepare a document where you’d list the position(s) that you’re applying for, all your achievements, especially related to the person whom you asked for the letter, and what strength(s) you might have shown in the collaboration with them. Mention all the projects that you were involved with with them and what your personal contribution in a given project was. If you did research with them, you might also want to mention how the project differed from prior work and how long you worked on the project. This will be a good starting point for your letter writer and ultimately, it will make their letter for you much stronger.

Finally, reach out to them early enough before the reference letter deadline because most likely, they are busy and you do not want to put additional pressure on their shoulders with last-minute letter requests.