枕着云的远航

刚拿到了第二封推荐信：）以下是发在BBY论坛上的总结，也贴在这里纪念一下～

--------------我是土土汀分割线--------------

This afternoon I talked to Professor Green and his wife Professor Zhou, both of whom are the professor of PSU. And I got a recommendation from Professor Zhou~, who is also the member of PSU committee.

I want to share the following with you guys:

First of all, just be yourself, not pretend to be better. When you do not know what to talk with professors, you may just simply talk about your interest, your plan, your concern and your worry. Last night, I tried to figure out some questions that will please the professors but I can hardly think out any. So I decided just simply to tell them all my concerns about my future research and my application. It turned out to be very successful! Those two professors appreciated my interests in the fundamental problems and think I am the right student they are looking for…Only they feel that they really know you, they can decide whether they like this student or not, or how they can help this young man or woman.

Secondly, proper technique is important at the same time. The one I used today is “name the people the professor might know”. I know one Japanese professor who gave me a recommendation, and one PSU graduate student who I actually just wrote an e-mail to. I mentioned these two people properly during the conversation. It turned out that professors know the Japanese professor and think he is a very nice person and good economists, and that graduate student is rightly the student of the two professors…You must admit the world is small, especially the academic world. In my opinion, there are at least two benefits to use this strategy: the first is that it can magically shorter the distance between you and the professor; the second is that the type of the person you’ve already know can show some of your qualities at the same time (Both of the people I mentioned are all doing some fundamental research). This inspires me another benefit of actively keeping in touch with professors and graduate students in US.

Thirdly, since one of the professors is the committee, I asked about my advantages compared with graduate students (Really a weak question, right? But this was really my concern.). She told me that they use different standards to judge undergraduate students and graduate students. For an undergraduate student, if you have already tried some research, that is enough. Actually in their mind, relatively good or bad researches look pretty like the same. What’s more important for an undergraduate student is whether he or she has deep understanding of the basic fundamental concept or not and whether he or she has seriously considered the motivation to do research. She mentioned that she was really frustrated when seeing lots of PS saying that “because of the rapid growth of Chinese economy, I determined to study economics…”

Fourthly, professors needn’t to be impressed first by your solid research background. If you have enough passion, find way to show him your passion. They treasure that a lot.