#15: Recommendations

A recommendation letter can make or break your med school application. A sparkling letter is equivalent to applying as a fifth generation legacy, so you should make sure to get as many as possible (stealing them from other students if necessary). Obviously the easiest way to secure these is to sleep with your professors, but generally speaking, the more mature or more female a professor is, the less likely they are to entertain this possibility. (Note that this is not true if you are in middle school.)

A more realistic way to get a good recommendation letter from a professor is to take a lot of classes with them, like more than five. Make sure to be that annoying kid who asks lots of questions during lecture and needlessly prolongs class for everyone else. It's a surefire way to guarantee that your professor - and everyone else - will never be able to forget you. If you can manage to do this for more than one professor, you should have no problem getting the recommendations you require. You will also be universally loathed by your classmates, which is a small price to pay for something so important.

If you have trouble burying your self-consciousness long enough to enact the previously mentioned tactic, you will need to take more subtle routes to remind your professor of how awesome of a student you were. One thing to do is to make a packet for your professors that has all the information they need in order to write the recommendation. Make sure to include a cover letter, a transcript with your best classes prominently highlighted, and a gift card to their favorite restaurant or department store. Feel free to blatantly lie about your accomplishments in your cover letter; as professors have to deal with upwards of 100 students per semester, it is highly unlikely that they will know anything about you. Finally, people often say to write professors a thank you letter once you've been accepted to a school, but this is entirely unnecessary; since you'll never see these professors again, you are under no obligation to pretend to care about what they think of you any longer.

If you can help it, try to get actual copies of the recommendation letters to see what they say about you. This can be easily accomplished by renting a P.O. Box from the post office for a fake program (e.g., "Tidewater University Summer Scholars Program"), and having your professor send in a recommendation to that P.O. Box for you. This course of action has many benefits, the most obvious of which is that you will be able to find out exactly what your professors will write about you. With this knowledge, you will now have the power to prevent them from backstabbing you in the future.