I didn’t know any of my lecturers/tutors well at all during university.
Can I use a reference from volunteering at a school I’ve been doing for 8 months instead?
Update:
Thanks for all the advice.
I asked a supervisor I had for a project I did at university which was education based. She said yes and asked for a summary of the information she needs and what I’ve been up to which I sent over today.
Starting to feel like I’ve got a decent application coming together 🙂
4 comments
Go for it
Up to you really, I personally wouldn’t but you know you. You don’t have to know your lecturers personally btw.
A simple email “hi former lecturer, I was a student in your class XYZ back in 2016, I’m applying for the JET programme (short explanation of jet). I need an academic reference to apply, would you be open to being one of my references? All the best, OP.”
The academic reference is only required for people applying while in university. If you’ve graduated, you just need to find two strong references (from supervisors).
There’s two ways to go about it, really.
When I applied, i was in my final semester of undergrad. I asked one of the jobs I had to write my professional resume and wanted to ask my old Japanese professor to write my other LOR.
….except she forgot enough to even remember how I was when I was in her class. My Programming Languages professor (a chill guy who totally is the stereotypical laid-back coder guy) heard me griping about it like a week later and basically just told me “yeah if you write the letter of rec and send it to me, I’ll totally just skim over it and sign off on it”. Ended up doing just that, and got called in for an interview and got waitlisted -> upgraded.
Turns out a lot of letters work like that — professors will usually refuse unless you’ve had a long working relationship with them or if they have a dearth of time in their schedule. But if you do the writing and all they have to do is basically check to see that it sounds believeable to them and isn’t something like “XYZ cured cancer and loves babies” they’re usually a lot more open to giving you one. All it is is like a paragraph or two saying that you’re not a serial killer or an asshole.
Or if you graduated, just get two professional ones. Academic’s only required if you’re not going to graduate before September of the application year.