Personalized reference letters that don’t take hours of your time: a workshop for developing a personal and efficient reference writing system

Reference letters are one of the key ways an instructor can support their students that directly contributes to their future success. However, writing strong, accurate and personalized letters can take a lot of time and effort. Given that nearly every student requires one (or three) reference letters to proceed to the next stage of their education or career, it can quickly become overwhelming for those receiving reference requests, even when considering only well-deserving candidates. In this workshop, we will discuss how to set fair limits on who we write reference letters for and share our most efficient systems for collecting and compiling the necessary information about each candidate, as well as our best strategies for efficiently writing the letters or completing the associated forms. Then, we will develop our own personal systems, so that by the end of this workshop, all participants should have a personalized functional system that will make their reference writing process more sustainable going forward. Participants are encouraged to bring their own device (laptop, tablet, or smart phone) so you can directly create/adapt your system during the workshop.