He has sterling communication skill - giving approval for talent of a student

Letter of recommendation from my Dean - Expressing support for student

Hi, I try to create a letter of recommendation from my desk my Dean. Unfortunately he's very busy, and I have to finish this letter before Thursday.

As always, please give me any reviews/suggestions.

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To whom it may concern,
I write this letter to support my student (Iwan Bagus Setyawan) in my capacity as his dean. Overall, I recognize him as a hard-working person who has tremendous spirit to pursue his dreams and has positive willingness to dedicate himself for his country especially in developing better education for the next generation.

I have known him since 2010 when he joined the university and became my student. I noticed that he is kind of person who has analytical and sequential thinking. This quality is just perfectly fit with his major that requires people who can do detailed analysis through the system and provide relevant solutions regarding any issues related to the system.

During his study in the college, he played well both as independent player and contributes his utmost as a part of a team. In 2013, he was participating the community service subject as the field coordinator and successfully managed him team to finish the program. While completing his study, he also joined several campus activities including Art Students Community and Assistant of Programming Laboratory. He is kind of a person who is curious about learning new things and knowledge. These capacities have been proved by several trainings that he had joined such as Linux Operating System training, Website Development training, and Java training. In addition, he is also kind of person who likes challenges and always wanted to do his best in every task that he had.

I believe he is a great candidate for your program because he has sterling communication skill which is prominent in his field as the System Analyst. He can transfer the client's requirement into the computing languages. In addition to his personality, he has positive spirit who can affect others and he loved to motivate other student to finish the task completely.

Based on the affirmative reasons above, I am very glad to recommend him in your program. I feel certain if his application is accepted, it will has great impact in his development both in career and education. If you require any further information, please feel free to contact me and I will write it for you.

Bagu, when was the Dean your professor? He mentioned that you were his student. So you need to include a reference to the class that he taught and how you performed in it. If you were never his student, then you should just remove that point in the essay so that the sentence and paragraph makes more sense to the reader. By the way, don't keep your name in the parenthesis. Your name should be part of the opening sentence. If there is one thing missing in this reference from your dean, it is a reference to your grade performance as well any recognition and awards that you received from the university during your time as a student. The reason that you should refer to this is because the dean normally reserves his recommendation letters for the most exemplary students of the university. Therefore, to have him write this letter and not refer to your accomplishments as a student makes the reference questionable. You could make reference to accomplishments or recognition you received when you attended those seminars if you do not have any academic accolades to speak of. Just remember, the reference of a dean is a big deal, so make it count. Make sure that he sings praises of you, in terms of accomplishments whenever you can.

I can see that you have gathered a very comprehensive feedback for one of EssayForum contributors. As additional points, my feedback would focus on the paragraphing structure of your letter, lexical resource usage, grammatical range, and accuracy. First of all, it seems like you have written some unconscious word/phrase repetitions. This can be avoided by using proper synonyms to replace the previous phrase/words. For instance, when you write 'kind of person', it is written 3 times in a single letter. There are actually many possible synonyms to replace them, such as '.... is a person who...', '.... is a ..... person.', and many more.

If you take a closer look on the last part of the letter, you will notice "If you require any further information, please feel free to contact me and I will write it for you." Does 'it' refer to 'information'? If yes, it was a redundant thing to do. It is already clear that if someone 'contacts' others, they definitely look for 'information'. Also, the reviewer might not contact your dean via e-mail / letter only. You need to know that there's a Skype or other social media that can use 'call' / 'video call' feature. This is the platform that is usually used by an employer/reviewer/selection committee to interview/confirm its candidate/employee abilities/skills.

@Holt
Thank you.
I did some revisions based on your suggestions.
1. I remove the part of being his student because actually he only taught me in 1 semester
2. The name position is already revised
3. Ah this is the problem, I don't really have any great achievements while I was studying but I try to emphasize that I was actively involved in campus activities as I mentioned in the letter. What do you think about it?

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@ichanpants89
yes thank you, so many repetitions. :D
but I already to use more synonims.
Please give me your review again.

Hi Bagu, remove the reference to "During his study in college..." he has already established that he observed you as a student when you "joined the university" that is enough of a reference to your studying college. Don't say "community service subject", it is sufficient to say "community service" because that is an extra curricular activity done at school. You are not graded for it. Therefore, it is not a program either but merely, an activity. Were the seminars you attended "on campus"? Meaning, these were course related seminars? If you attended these seminars "off campus" meaning on your own and it is not required in your course, then your dean has no business mentioning it in this essay because he doesn't know about it. Another point to remove is the part that says you have the ability to transfer the client's need to computing language. As your dean, he should not be making such assumptions. That is an over-statement.

Make the corrections I mentioned above and then review the essay again. This time, read it from the point of view of a reviewer as I do. If you feel that there are certain parts that make it obvious that this recommendation letter was developed by the student and not the dean, as I often caught you doing and am asking you to change now, then remove those parts totally. The reviewers know when the letter is self serving (written by the student) and will then begin to question the authority and validity of the letter you are writing. Yes, the university could go so far as to call your university and confirm that the letter was indeed written by the dean and not the student.