Understand the purpose of a reference
“A leopard does not change his spots.” Most people believe that people can evolve and grow but do not change entirely because their basic values, temperament and judgement are stable qualities. A candidate can look good on paper and be completely charming in the interview, but be a poor fit for the company’s needs because their values, temperament and judgement are in conflict with the requirements of the potential position. A reference helps an employer or a graduate school learn about how the candidate has performed in the past.
What does that mean for your references?
Unless you have been asked for a character reference, do not suggest people you know exclusively in a social and community capacity. Employers perceive this as an indicator that you do not have any better references to give. Your social network will support you unreservedly no matter what. One of your references should always be your most recent supervisor. If you are still working for her and she does not know you are looking to make a change, you can stipulate that she not be contacted unless there is a job offer on the table.
Supervisors within the past five years are also good references, but presumably you have grown and changed over the past five years, so it would be of little value to go farther back. If you have little paid employment experience, another good “supervisor” reference would be volunteer program coordinators that you worked under.
Professors have spent time with you teaching you in a course or thesis, and potentially supervising you on a work-study project, and that is one reason why they are often asked for references. However the professor is not just being asked to comment on your marks. A reference is about the other performance qualities that the transcript does not capture.
References are people who can and will provide an unbiased impression of your values, temperament and judgement based on their past interactions with you
What values, temperament and judgement are reflected by these situations?
- A student, preparing for an interview, asked other students what interview questions the employer tended to ask, then consulted me for advice. “They are going to ask me what my goals are. What should I say?”
- Another student was applying for graduate admission. I gave him an outline of my ongoing research and asked him to indicate potential thesis topics he could see himself doing that would move the research program forward. He responded was a hard worker and quick learner who would do whatever he was asked to do, and would be forever grateful for my esteemed supervision.
Potential graduate supervisors and employers want to avoid recruiting people like this.
Graduate programs and employers use references’ impressions to decide how a person will fit in their program or workplace
Isn’t this discrimination?
Discrimination means to tell items apart. One person is being chosen from 5, 10, 100, or 999 candidates. Every job hiring and graduate student recruitment involves discrimination. Unless the decision process involves some intentional or systemic discrimination against a protected group, it is not only inherent, but it is essential. It is perfectly acceptable and even essential to discriminate against people with poor judgement, for example. Furthermore, an unsuccessful candidate may have been “better” in some way than the successful candidate. There are many dimensions of comparison and the chosen candidate may be better on the most important dimension. Also, there is no requirement that the “best” candidate be selected. The employer or program may be trying to create a well-balanced team and may only be concerned that the chosen candidate is good enough and has skills that complement rather than duplicate the other members of the team.
Is there at least some way to know what they want to hear about me?
Unless the employer is hiring people into a training program, they will be selecting people ready to get work done. A person who creates work for others in the process of doing their own—needing constant attention, explanation of criteria, clarification of methods, feedback—will not beat a candidate who has proven that she is ready to work independently. This is the sort of thing references can tell them because references have seen how you perform in similar situations.
In graduate school, faculty supervisors are looking for the ideal graduate student who creates “negative work”: someone who carries some of the research workload and does not add more to replace it: explaining to the student how to do things that should be either self-learned or already learned in undergraduate coursework, boosting their confidence or reminding them to complete tasks, counselling their personal problems, or editing their thesis. These tasks create work for the professor and do not move the research along, but the issue is not just that they create work but the type of work they create is not the type of work the professor wants to do. She has not been through graduate school and written countless grant applications to establish a career as a researcher in order to be a student’s life coach while the student has the pleasure of doing the research itself. The graduate school admissions committee will be testing in a variety of obvious and not-so-obvious ways whether the candidate is going to be positive work or negative work for the faculty supervisors.
In the real world, not only do you often not know the marking scheme and weights, or when the test will be, but in fact everything is a test. In the real world, you must spend a considerable amount of your time deducing the power relations in the workplace (the marking scheme) from peoples’ behaviour. Criteria conflict. Satisfying one person completely dissatisfies another. You can do 100% of what you were asked to do and still be considered a slacker if everyone around you is showing initiative and finding things to do that go beyond their assignments and add value to the employer or supervisor.
A reference is probably quite different from most of the evaluation you have experienced in the past
This can be a new and unsettling way of thinking about evaluation for you. Through high school, it is pretty obvious when you are being evaluated, because months ahead of time, you are told there is a test on January 25. Next Friday is a test. The test is at 3:00 pm. The test starts now and you have 45 minutes. After the test, you are given your mark. It is almost expected that everyone is treated the same between tests, so that labelling someone a “poor student” does not become a self-fulfilled prophesy.
In university, course management policies often require professors to provide a clear outline of how marks are earned in a course, and place strict limits even on “pop quizzes” so that you know at the start of a course what weight is attached to various coursework and when the test and evaluation periods and methods will be. You may even find that essays, papers and reports are marked with a rubric, like a primary school assignment, in response to previous demands for students to know where they lost points. This is a relatively recent evolution in the university world, coinciding with a student generation that professors often describe as having a “sense of entitlement”. Rather than the impression that points had to be earned by learning, there is the impression that the points are theirs until they lose them. A strong consumer orientation to learning, and reinforced by your parents, has made today’s students vigilant about getting every mark they deserve. These course management policies ensure you are marked fairly and rules are not changed in the middle of the game. Following these policies ensures that you are not cheated out of points on your transcript, but you are cheated out of valuable real world experience of thinking for yourself about the consequences of your choices and actions. In recent years, I have noticed that many students work to these specific details, even deliberately neglecting the big picture, to ensure that they maximize their points on assignments. Although these students earn all of the available points, it is obvious to the professor that the student is primarily interested in marks–not the paper for its own sake. Because the marking scheme is set, deductions may not be made, but it is an impression that will be recalled at reference time.
The half-life of diligent obedience is short. In fact, it is not likely to get you into graduate school or many professional careers. Every question you are asked by a potential employer or graduate supervisor is a test where you do not know the marking scheme, weight, or right answer.
