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Questions about references

I have so far gotten great advice on this site so thank you for that! :smile:

now i have yet another question.

I am an international student and therefore not so familiar with the whole application process for UK universities. One thing i am unsure about are the references.

I want to apply to masters degrees and of course i dont want to apply to just one university because i think that would not really help my chances to get into a program that interests me. So i was planning on applying to a hand full of universities about 5-7?

i read the "how to apply" section on some university websites and it sometimes says that one can provide the references in one of three ways "upload it with the application" "provide an email adress of the referee so that they can then send the reference directly" "dont remeber the third i think by post"
So now i was wondering... here in germany it is custom that one asks a professor or whomever to write a reference and then they hand it to you. They write general things about you. How they know you what they think about you personally/professionally. But i dont think it is really common to have a professor write you 5-7 single references... i think they would feel really annoyed if multiple emails appeared and they would have to type the same nonsense time and again in some online thingy... so how exactly does the reference thing work? I am used to a referee writing one reference and one can then multiply said reference and send it to all the programms/jobs one applies to. Of course one has to provide phone number, email adress, adress, workplace and so on of the referee but of course that is as well to be found on the reference letter itself. So the institution one applies to can check the validity of the reference letter.

So what is the practice here... do i really have to bug my referees to write me 5-7 references and therefore probably get less enthusiastic and more annoyed references or can i upload the reference letters they hand me and simply upload them with my application? Or do they have to use the reference form and then hand it back to me?
Do you all have such paitient professors who actually have the time to write a bunch of references (i mean in the UK they probably get asked a lot more often to write such things because here i wouldnt even need a reference for most - almost all - masters programms. And aparently you all do...^^)

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 1

poohat

provide an email address and they will contact the referee directly. Your referee wont write 5 different references, they'll just send the same one to each person that contacts them.

Tell your referees roughly how many reference requests they can expect to get.

Reply 2

Sinirastas

Some universities however may require that the reference is printed out to their own fancy forms with school logos on them (like University of Stirling) and that indeed may cause some extra trouble for the referees - maybe this is not necessary, not all universities ask for this and even then I believe you could work around it by calling to the admissions office and ask for alternative way to deliver the reference, but it's good to know that universities do have different policies about this!

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 3

iceflyier

Usually the universities provide you with an online reference system. I'm not entirely sure what my referees write about me, but I would assume that they copy and paste from a more general template they use for my letters, rather than re-writing it, say, six times.

I don't know if your professors will be annoyed with you asking them to write these letters - I mean, you can't be the the first German applicant to the UK, so I should think that they've had these requests before. Don't sweat it too much! If they say they'll write it, they will.