Information for letter writers

This page provides information for people named as references by our applicants. Thank you for agreeing to write a letter of recommendation for one of our applicants and helping us in the selection process in this way.

We will contact each recommender by email upon submission of the application and include further information about the process. The letters will remain confidential and will be accessible only to the participating scientists of the Research Training Groups.

On this page we put together some guidelines for these letters. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us at ulrich.goertz@uni-due.de.

The key points that we would like to learn through your letter are

What is your judgment of the potential of the candidate for doing an excellent PhD project in one of the research areas of the Essen Seminar for Algebraic Geometry and Arithmetic. Please give us your frank opinion on the skills the candidate currently has, and the potential for doing research in mathematics within a PhD project.

What is your judgment based on? Please give us some information for how long you have known the candidate, and in which setting have you worked with her or him (advised a thesis, taught a course, conducted a seminar …).

Some further pieces of information that could be useful for us:

• How would you rank the candidate in a suitable comparison group?
• Can you judge the English language skills of the applicant? (Writing/Speaking)
• Do you think the candidate would integrate well in a group of PhD students and contribute to the acitivities of the group?

We do not expect the letters to be very long — it is more important to us to receive a frank evaluation of the candidate.