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Letter of recommendation · annotated sample

LOR from a Head of Department

How a senior recommender adds credibility: a ranking against a stated cohort, dated achievements and one honest area of growth.

Closest to you if your Head of Department is writing your letter.

For Sneha Patil (fictional) · written by her Head of Department · 309 words

Notes reviewed by Ankit Jaiswal (M.Sc. Embedded Systems, TU Chemnitz · guiding Indian students since 2018) · September 2026

Fictional sample. Sneha and every college, company and number here are invented. Learn from the structure, but write your own words: many universities check applications for copied text, and a borrowed story will not survive an interview question.

The document, with reviewer notes

[College name and logo]

Department of Mechanical Engineering · [address] · [website]

12 March 2026

Note 1Official letterhead and a date. Letters without them are easy to doubt and are sometimes rejected by admission offices.

To the Admissions Committee, M.Sc. Mechanical Engineering

Note 2Addressed to the programme. If the letter goes to several universities, "To the Admissions Committee" alone is fine.

I am pleased to recommend Ms Sneha Patil for your Master's programme. I have known her since 2022, when I taught her Design of Machine Elements in her third year, and as Head of Department I chaired the panel that examined her final-year project.

Note 3States the relationship and how long it lasted in the first paragraph. The committee needs this to judge everything that follows.

Sneha graduated fourth in a batch of 118 students. What set her apart was not the grade itself but how she used the subject. In Design of Machine Elements she was one of very few students who checked textbook safety factors against a real failure, bringing a cracked bracket from her Baja SAE team's vehicle to class and asking why our calculation said it should have survived.

Note 4A ranking with the cohort size, followed by a specific moment only this teacher could describe. One real example is worth more than five adjectives.

Her final-year project, a composite leaf spring for a light commercial vehicle, was the strongest our panel examined that year. She validated her simulation against a physical prototype and, when the fatigue test disagreed with her model, she did not hide the result. She presented it as the most important finding of the project and explained its cause clearly.

Note 5Describes the project from the recommender's point of view (what the panel saw), which confirms the SOP without repeating it.

In her first two years Sneha was hesitant to present her work, and she would let teammates speak for results she had produced. By her final year she led her team's design review at the national Baja SAE event, and she answered the judges' questions on suspension geometry herself.

Note 6One honest area of growth makes the rest of the letter more believable. Letters with only superlatives are usually discounted.

In nineteen years of teaching I would place Sneha among the top five percent of students I have taught for analytical ability and for rigour and honesty with data. I recommend her without reservation and would be glad to answer any questions.

Note 7A clear comparative judgement and an offer to be contacted. No request for financial assistance, a common leftover from older US-style templates.

Yours sincerely,

[Signature and department stamp]
Dr [Recommender name]
Professor and Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering
[College name and address]
[official email address] · [office phone]

Note 8Full title, institution and an official email. A personal Gmail address for a professor is a common reason for verification emails and delays.

Before you borrow this structure

  • Your recommender must write, or at least fully review and sign, the final letter. A draft helps them; it does not replace them.
  • Every claim needs to be something this person actually saw. Remove anything they cannot confirm.
  • Use official letterhead and an official college email address. Many universities contact recommenders directly.
  • Check whether the university wants the letter uploaded by you, sent by the recommender, or filled in on its own form.

Write your own version

Start from your own profile, not from Sneha's.

Prepare a draft for your recommenderDownload as Word (free account)

The Word file includes these notes at the end, and a fill-in outline is there too.

Want an expert to read your draft? Application review: One final expert check of your application documents before you submit.

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