Behind the Scenes: How Research Letters Are Really Written

Last winter, a third-year medical student forwarded me a draft of a “letter of recommendation” that her research mentor had asked her to write. She was horrified. “Is this normal? Am I being tested? What am I supposed to say about myself?”

Let me tell you what really happens: most students think research letters are crafted in some solemn, independent process by busy faculty carefully weighing your strengths. What actually happens is far messier, more political, and way more dependent on how you manage the relationship than anyone tells you.

This is the part nobody explains on the premed forums or in your school’s “how to ask for letters” workshop. So I will.

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The Uncomfortable Truth: Who Really Writes the Letter

Here’s the first secret: for a huge proportion of research letters—premed, med school, and residency-level—the student writes at least the first draft.

Not sometimes. Not rarely. Commonly.

Faculty will phrase it politely:

• “Could you send me some bullet points of things you’d like highlighted?”
• “Why don’t you draft something and I’ll edit it?”
• “Put together a summary of your work and strengths; I’ll use that to guide my letter.”

To you, it sounds like help. To them, it’s survival. They’re juggling grants, patients, admin meetings, and three other students asking for letters on the same deadline.

Behind the scenes, the process often looks like this:

1. Faculty gets your email request.
2. They open their calendar, see 12 other fires to put out.
3. They type: “Happy to support. Please send me your CV, personal statement, and bullet points of what you’d like me to emphasize. If you’d like to draft something, I’m glad to edit.”

Do some faculty still write letters from scratch? Yes—especially true mentors, chairs writing for top candidates, and older-school attendings who take pride in it.

But the reality in 2025: if you don’t give them material, they either:

• Write something painfully generic in 10 minutes, or
• Delay so long your letter is rushed, half-baked, or late.

From the program director side, we can recognize these rushed letters instantly. “Hard-working, punctual, team player” with no specifics? It screams, I don’t really know this student and I didn’t spend more than five minutes on this.

You do not want to be that person.

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What Faculty Actually Think When You Ask for a Letter

Let’s strip the politeness away for a moment. When you ask a PI or attending for a research letter, here’s what often runs through their head:

• “How well do I actually know this student?”
• “Can I honestly say they are in the top group of students I’ve worked with?”
• “Will I get burned if someone calls me and asks for more detail?”
• “Do I have time to make this letter decent?”
• “How much political capital do I want to spend on this person?”

If you’ve done one summer project, showed up inconsistently, and disappeared once you got a line on your CV, they remember that.

If you showed up early, kept detailed data, made their life easier, fixed figures without being asked twice, and didn’t flake when things got boring? They remember that too.

Here’s something you almost never hear: some faculty maintain mental tiers of letter strength. They may not admit it, but they do.

• Tier 1: “I will go to bat for this person; I’ll write a truly strong, detailed letter.”
• Tier 2: “I’ll support them honestly, but not exaggerate.”
• Tier 3: “I’ll write something neutral because I can’t say much more.”
• Tier 4: “I should probably decline, but I might write a vague ‘faint praise’ letter if pushed.”

When someone asks you, “Do you feel you can write me a strong letter of recommendation?” they are grateful. That single word—strong—gives them an easy out. If they hesitate or soften the language (“I can write you a letter”), that is not a compliment.

You want them in Tier 1. Or at least high Tier 2.

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How Research Letters Are Really Built: The Step-by-Step

Let’s walk through how letters usually get put together, from the inside.

Step 1: The “Ask” and First Impression

The email you send to request the letter matters more than you think.

Faculty are pattern recognizers. A sloppy, vague, last-minute email suggests a sloppy, vague, last-minute student. That bleeds into how they mentally frame your entire narrative.

What they prefer (but seldom tell you):

• Clear subject line with the purpose and deadline.
• Explicit ask for a strong letter.
• Exactly what you’re applying for (program, position, grant).
• A brief reminder of what you did with them (they may not remember details).
• Attached CV, personal statement draft if you have one.
• Deadlines and instructions, with links.

If your email is, “Hey Dr. X, I’m applying to MD schools and need a LOR, can you write one?” with no detail, you’ve already signaled you may not deserve a Tier 1 letter.

Step 2: The Quiet Background Check

You might think the letter is just that one person’s impression. Sometimes it is. But in larger labs and clinical research groups, here’s what also happens:

• The PI asks the postdoc or fellow: “How was she in the lab day-to-day?”
• They might ask the research coordinator, “Did he actually do the data or just put his name on the paper?”
• In academic hospitals, attendings talk. “You’ve worked with this student in clinic too, right? Solid?”

Those side comments shape tone and strength. A postdoc saying, “Honestly, she was great for two months and then vanished” will pull your letter from glowing to cautious.

Premeds often underestimate the research coordinator. Mistreat the coordinator and you sabotage the quiet background check that can upgrade your letter from generic to powerful.

Step 3: The “Send Me Material” Phase

This is the point where students either win or lose the game.

Most faculty will ask you to send:

• Your CV
• A draft of your personal statement if available
• A bullet-point list of projects, responsibilities, and accomplishments
• Sometimes, specific bullet points: “What would you like me to highlight?”

Here’s the part nobody tells you: those bullet points are not a courtesy; they’re the blueprint of your letter.

This is your chance to:

• Remind them of concrete tasks and hours you invested
• Highlight outcomes: poster, abstract, manuscript, dataset you cleaned
• Show maturity: reflect on skills you actually developed (not just “I learned a lot about science”)

What most students send is timid and vague: “Helped with data collection. Learned a lot about research. Presented at a poster session.”

What you should send is surgical and specific:

• “Independently managed data collection for 45-patient cohort, including screening >120 charts and extracting structured data into REDCap.”
• “Co-led weekly data cleaning meetings; identified and corrected three major coding inconsistencies that affected primary outcomes.”
• “Drafted introduction and methods for conference abstract; first author on poster presented at [specific conference].”

The stronger and more concrete your bullets, the easier it is for the faculty to sound impressively detailed about you. It reads like they know you very well—even when they’re reconstructing from your own bullets.

Step 4: Drafting (Who Actually Types the Words)

Now the controversial part. You send the bullets; sometimes you’re asked to draft the entire letter.

Here’s what usually happens in each scenario:

Scenario A: They draft it from your bullets
They open a prior letter they wrote for a good student. They change the name, adjust some adjectives, plug in your specific bullets, tweak for honesty, and call it a day. Ten to twenty minutes, tops.

If they genuinely like you, they’ll personalize:

• “Among the 60+ students I have mentored over the past decade, she stands in the top 5% in terms of initiative and reliability.”
• “He was the only student in our group to take responsibility for revising the manuscript after peer review.”

These comparison phrases—top 5%, top 10%, strongest in X years—are pure gold. Selection committees are trained to look for them. Weak letters rarely contain them.

Scenario B: They tell you to draft it
This is where students panic. But from the faculty perspective, it’s practical:

“You know your story. You know what you want to emphasize for MD/PhD/MD admission. Write a reasonable draft; I’ll correct, strengthen, or tone down as needed.”

Behind the scenes, different attendings handle this differently:

• Some just lightly edit, fix tone, and sign.
• Some rewrite heavily, especially if they worry you’ve oversold yourself.
• A small but non-trivial minority barely edit at all.

Program directors know this happens. They also know some letters are effectively student-written. The trick is: if your mentor agrees with the substance and signs their name, that’s their endorsement. No one’s doing forensic authorship analysis.

Your job: if you’re asked to draft, write the letter as if your worst critic on the committee will read it. Confident, specific, but not delusional.

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What Makes a Research Letter Actually Powerful

From the other side of the table—reading hundreds of letters each cycle—certain features stand out.

Specificity Over Adjectives

“Hard-working, bright, passionate about research” means nothing if not supported.

What swings decisions is specific, behavioral evidence:

• “Arrived early to clinic research days, often seeing the first study participants before I arrived.”
• “Personally handled IRB correspondence and modifications for our project, something usually assigned to residents or fellows.”
• “When our dataset was accidentally corrupted, she reconstructed it from backup logs over two weekends without being asked.”

Selection committees read through fluff quickly. They literally skim for:

• Concrete tasks
• Initiative
• Ownership of work
• Comparison to peers

Clear Comparison Statements

When a PI writes, “One of the top two students I have mentored in the last five years,” that is a blaring siren for evaluators.

Many schools train readers to look for these phrases and mentally score them.

Here’s the behind-the-scenes hierarchy of strength:

• “The best / one of the best / top 1–5%” → strong endorsement
• “Top 10–20%” → positive, solid
• “In the upper half” → faint praise
• “Comparable to other students at this level” → neutral at best
• No comparison at all → they either don’t know you well or don’t care enough to rank

Most students never think to seed their bullet points with information that makes comparison easy:

“Of the four med students in the lab, I took primary responsibility for X,” or “I volunteered to…” Those stories give faculty raw material to write comparison statements with integrity.

Evidence of Integrity and Reliability

Research is built on trust. So when a letter says:

• “We trusted her with unblinded primary outcome data.”
• “He alerted me to an inconsistency in enrollment that would have favored a positive result for us; his honesty protected the study’s integrity.”

That lands far harder than another sentence about being “diligent.”

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The Quiet Politics: What Letters Signal Beyond You

You think the letter is about you and only you. The committees reading it know better.

Certain writers are known quantities:

• Famous PIs with dozens of publications.
• Department chairs.
• Long-established clinician-scientists in your specialty.

When one of them writes a strong, detailed letter, they’re not just lending their description; they’re lending their reputation. If they exaggerate wildly and it becomes obvious, it reflects on them. So they choose their words carefully.

This is why sometimes a short but highly specific letter from a heavyweight professor can carry more weight than a long, emotional letter from a junior fellow.

Behind closed doors, program leadership will say things like:

• “If Dr. X says this student is excellent, I believe it.”
• “Y tends to write everyone as the ‘best I’ve ever worked with’; discount slightly.”
• “Z is conservative with praise; if they’re calling someone ‘outstanding,’ that really matters.”

You do not control this directly. But you do control whose name ends up on your letters.

If all your research letters are from postdocs, fellows, or junior faculty, committees notice. Ideally, that junior mentor’s letter is co-signed or supplemented by a senior faculty member who can vouch at a higher level.

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How You Quietly Shape the Letter Months Before You Ask

This is the part students chronically underestimate. By the time you’re emailing for a letter, 80% of the work that determines its strength is already done.

From the faculty side, here’s what makes us want to write a great letter:

• You show up consistently, on time, without drama.
• You send polished drafts, not excuses.
• When you don’t know something, you ask early.
• You handle boring tasks without complaints: chart review, data cleaning, REDCap entry.
• You close the loop on tasks. If you say you’ll do it by Friday, it’s done by Friday.

Then there are the small details that trigger vivid anecdotes in letters:

• You stayed late to help enroll a complicated subject.
• You found a design flaw in the survey questions and suggested a fix.
• You kept a meticulous lab notebook that bailed the team out when re-analysis was needed.

Those small incidents are what we reach for when we sit down to write. Without them, we default to, “They were a solid, reliable student” and the letter blends into the pile.

Your mentality should be: Every interaction with a mentor is potential letter content. That does not mean being fake or performative. It does mean being consistently professional in ways that give them real stories to tell.

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Exactly What To Do When a Mentor Says, “Draft Something”

This moment unnerves almost everyone. Here’s the playbook from someone who’s watched students either blow it or handle it cleanly.

1. Do not freak out. This is normal. They’re not testing your humility; they’re minimizing their time load.
2. Ask for guidance. One short reply: “Happy to draft something. Are there particular strengths or experiences you’d especially like me to highlight from your perspective?” This gives them a chance to steer or at least feel included.
3. Study the genre. Get 2–3 anonymized sample letters from trusted upperclassmen or your advising office. Pattern-match structure and tone.
4. Write it from their standpoint, not as a self-praise essay. Imagine you’re them. Use “I” statements, objective observations, comparisons to cohorts they actually have.
5. Be specific, not grandiose. “Among the strongest students I’ve worked with in the last few years” is believable. “Best student I’ve ever met” unless you truly are is how letters start to sound phony.
6. Leave space for them to modify. Do not turn it into a manifesto. Keep it 1–1.5 pages. Plain, professional, and editable.

A faculty member who cares will soften, strengthen, or correct as needed. One who doesn’t was never going to write you a masterpiece anyway. But at least you’ve provided a solid starting point.

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The Premed Angle: How This Plays Out Before Med School

Premeds get hit the hardest by this opacity because you’re often working with PhDs, postdocs, or MDs who don’t specialize in writing medical school letters.

For medical school admissions, research letters serve one crucial extra function: they show you can function in an academic, long-term, project-driven environment.

Adcoms scan premed research letters for:

• How long you worked with the mentor (6 weeks vs 2 years).
• Whether you stuck with a project through completion (poster, paper, major dataset).
• Whether the mentor trusted you with autonomy.

So if your research experience was one summer pipetting for eight weeks and never seeing the data again, you must squeeze every concrete responsibility out of that time and make sure your letter writer remembers them.

You should also, even as a premed, frame your work in ways that faculty can use:

• “I took responsibility for logging all experimental runs and troubleshooting protocol deviations.”
• “I generated figures using R for the weekly lab meeting presentations.”
• “I prepared the first draft of the introduction section for our manuscript.”

Remember: your letter writer may sit on PhD admissions committees, not MD ones. They’re not automatically tuned into what medical schools want. Your bullet points are their translation guide.

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FAQ: Behind-the-Scenes Answers to What You’re Afraid to Ask

1. If my mentor asks me to draft my own letter, is that unethical?
No. It’s extremely common. The ethics hinge on whether the final content reflects what your mentor genuinely believes. They have full right—and responsibility—to edit, strengthen, or tone down anything that does not match their experience of you. Draft honestly and let them calibrate.

2. How do I know if my research letter will actually be strong, not just polite?
Listen carefully to how they respond when you ask. If they say, “I can write you a letter,” that’s lukewarm. If they respond with, “I’d be happy to write you a strong letter,” or spontaneously praise your work, that’s a good sign. Also, mentors who ask detailed follow-up questions or request time to talk about your goals often care enough to write something meaningful.

3. Does a famous name matter more than someone who knows me well?
A famous PI who barely knows you and writes a bland letter is less useful than a mid-level faculty member who supervised you closely and writes a detailed, specific, comparative letter. The ideal is both: direct supervisor writes the rich letter, and a senior faculty member co-signs or submits a brief, corroborating note. If forced to choose, pick depth of knowledge over pure name recognition.

4. Can a “neutral” research letter hurt my application?
Yes, in a subtle but real way. Admissions and selection committees read so many letters that a neutral one—generic praise, no comparisons, no specifics—signals that you were not memorable. In competitive pools, “forgettable” is effectively a soft negative. It won’t sink you alone, but it can break a tie against you when others have stronger advocacy.

5. What’s the single best thing I can do now to secure a strong future research letter?
Make yourself indispensable on one concrete piece of the project. Own something—data collection, analysis pipeline, IRB submissions, figure generation—so that in a year your mentor can say, without hesitation, “This part of the work would not have happened without them.” Every powerful letter I’ve seen boils down to that sentence in some form.

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At the end of the day, research letters are not mysterious essays conjured in closed rooms. They’re the written residue of how seriously you treated the work, how professionally you behaved over time, and how proactively you help your mentor tell your story.

If you remember only three things: give your faculty something specific to say, earn comparison-level praise months before you ask for it, and when you’re invited to shape your own letter, treat that “burden” for what it is—a quiet, very real form of power.