Peer recommendations
What are the three adjectives that best describe your friend? This question was recently posited in the ever-annoying peer recommendations that are due tomorrow and which, of course, I have yet to finish.
These peer recommendations are essays, completed by friends and classmates, which discuss your positive traits and characteristics. They, hypothetically, provide the Student Services Office with more information about you, and many colleges also ask for peer recommendations.
But aside from the 20 minutes these blue sheets of paper take away from my day, there are other problems with them. How could I possibly sum up my friends and classmates in a paragraph or two? Isn’t my friendship with someone much more than three of his or her positive traits?
College admissions essays are, in general, useless. What was your most emotionally significant moment and why? That hardly gives me room to explain who I am. But, I’m at least given leeway to use anecdotes, throw in my own voice, and attempt to display the true Sarah.
However, peer recommendations are even worse. I don’t get to explain how my friend and I met. I don’t have the opportunity to show why we are still friends. The little sheet of paper doesn’t ask what the greatest thing about my friend is. Instead, I am given less than half a page to describe this person’s most unique quality.
Let me use a scenario to showcase the flaw with this system. Say that I label my friend’s most unique quality as her determination. She is an athlete, and she works hard to give her best performance at every game and practice. She never gives up, even when the score is lopsided and there isn’t a victory in sight.
Now, say that I have another friend, and not being very creative, I label that friend’s most unique quality as her determination. She really likes math, and is currently taking calculus. She works really hard to do well in the class and never gives up on a problem.
But how have I differentiated between these two girls? They are both determined, in numerous ways. They may be similar in numerous ways as well. But from this peer recommendation, it just sounds like they never give up on the task at hand, whether that is math or sports.
Plus, there are the cop-out adjectives. My friend is nice, happy, and sincere. Why, thank you for killing a tree just to write that watery mix of terminology. Half the people who are asked to write recommendations don’t really want to write them. So what is stopping someone from throwing some frilly words on a piece of paper and handing it in?
It seems that these peer recommendations aren’t really worth it. The few key characteristics that you might glean from thousands of recommendations aren’t important enough. You could learn that about a person from sitting down and talking to them. Why don’t we refrain from piling more work into a junior’s day and attempt to find other ways to learn that a student is nice?
— Sarah Pfander
Comments
I’m not sure which friend you are talking about—-I won’t share my guesses—-but the lunch bell rang 10 minutes ago, and nobody has yet emerged from the calc test, save for two people who look like they had to be somewhere else 10 minutes ago.
Sometimes juniors give themselves too much work: too many extracurriculars, too many electives they shouldn’t be in, too many pointless activities.
But all of us should be aware of just how heavily-burdened junior year at Uni can get. I do not know the answers; I just know how people get swamped. I wish I could brighten this up with a story of my own youthful stupidity, like the last time Sarah shared an opinion with which I totally agreed. Sorry! I took serious classes in my high school, placing out of 6 college courses, but was not so crushed by work that I had no time to live.
Let us all be aware of the workload here.
Posted by: rayrayplainsalt | February 28, 2007 11:55 AM
One would think that the calc student would be naturally differentiable! (ba-dum-dum-tshh!)
On a more serious note, the peer recommendations serve an important function by allowing the SSO to know a little more about you, from a different vantage point than they normally get. It’s far preferable to a situation without Peer Recs, where the SSO might have to blindly grab for characteristics and may even end up mislabeling you. Also, trying to find someone else’s unique quality will aid you in finding your own when it comes time to write those college essays.
Posted by: Ben Hyman | February 28, 2007 12:22 PM
I agree with Ben’s comment but I would also like to add, where would you be without a college essay or a peer recommendation letter?
While I understand that these things can not sum up how you and your friend met, will anything ever really explain who you are?
As a student who attended three high schools in four years, I really relied on my essays to express sentiments about myself that a letter grade or a standardized test score could not.
Also, I filled out tons of applications and did a few peer recs myself and hardly any of them simply said use one word to describe someone. So while you could use the word determination for both friends, you would be expected to explain why you chose those words.
Posted by: Dana | February 28, 2007 12:55 PM
Sarah,
As a person who writes college recommendations, I can tell you that the peer recs are very valuable to me. I frequently find the best insights come from the peer recs. Your friends know you in ways that we don’t, and I put a lot of faith in what they say about you. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone got “peer recs” so we could hear what our friends admire about us? Enjoy the process as much as you can.
Posted by: Kathleen Patton | February 28, 2007 3:07 PM
I agree with you Sarah, that peer recs can’t really give a good impression of a person… But I think that’s a pretty impossible task, even if you had all the paper in the world, as much time as you needed, and no form to follow. I think that at least it’s a start, at both getting writer and reader to think about the qualities of people - even if you can’t articulate descriptions as well as you’d like.
Regardless of what you actually write on the sheet, though, I think that making time to write peer recs is a good thing to do. How often do we have time to sit back and simply refelect on what makes our friends people that we value? It’s a cool opportunity.
As Ferris Bueller says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”
Posted by: Micah | March 1, 2007 8:16 PM