“How Do You Know the Individual, And in What Capacity?”
Pro-Tips on Writing College Recommendations
By Drew Gallagher
ADVANCE COLUMNIST
Not long ago, a kid from our neighborhood asked me to write him a letter of recommendation. He was hoping to land a football scholarship at an obscure Division I college out west that competes in something called the Big Sky Conference—which I’m pretty sure they would prefer I not refer to by their first two initials, even then no one has every heard of them.
Based on the sway that athletics holds over institutes of higher education, my character reference could have been written in crayon, just so long as long as I didn’t bring up pending murder charges, or the time I found the young man sleeping under our front hedgerow with a half-empty case of Busch Light Apple.
I somehow managed to complete the task, though not to specifications (More about that in a minute). I wanted to add, “No Artificial Intelligence was used in the writing of this letter,” but I refrained because that seemed like exactly something AI would say. Also, though I don’t generally use AI for anything, I confess I was tempted when confronted with the recommended word counts, which were a thousand for “How do you know the individual, and in what capacity?” and an astonishing 10,000 for the recommendation itself.
One thousand is a lot of words, especially when all you planned to write was “Nice kid. Lives down the block. Parents owe me money.” But it pales in comparison to the 10,000 those Utahns said they wanted. I once wrote an as-yet-unpublished novel that came in at 70,000, a project to which I devoted a lot of time and energy because I naively thought it might make me some money. I wasn’t at all interested in devoting the same time and energy to a character reference for a stud athlete who as it turned out had already reported to campus for summer workouts with the football team!
The daunting word count did make me wonder how someone might go about filling up 10,000 words in a character reference, and also if anyone had ever written one of these things and run out of words, which I fully intended to do. Fortunately, the Big Sky school had an 800-number set up to answer just those sorts of questions.
When I called, though, I was greeted by an automated voice and told that I’d caught them at a busy time and could I please hold. I never thought that 3:05 p.m. on a Thursday would prove to be a busy time, but then I remembered they were in the Mountain time zone and it was 1:05 there so they must be just getting back from lunch. I can only assume that reading 10,000-word character reference essays builds up quite an appetite, not to mention long periods of self-reflection about the usefulness—or uselessness—of that liberal arts degree about which their fathers had warned them.
After I sat on hold for 10 minutes, I was told that I wouldn’t be able to connect with a live person—then or ever—and I should leave a message. As one who has Verizon for my internet, cable, and telephone land line (which hasn’t worked in five years), I didn’t leave a message because I was sure someone would simply hit DELETE before listening to it, and mark every deletion with hash marks on a big whiteboard so they’d have something to celebrate at day’s end while hating their anti-liberal-arts fathers even more.
Still curious about these word counts, I went to the admissions office of my alma mater, Mary Washington College (now the University of), hoping they would respond even though I may not have made a donation in the 2025-2026 calendar year. (I did, however, make a donation to the new journalism scholarship at UMW named for my new boss, Steve Watkins. Steve hates my parenthetical asides, but I figure if I use one to remind him that I donated to the prestigious award named in his honor he would have to let this one fly.)
My point of contact at UMW was Melissa Yakabouski, dean of Admission, and she couldn’t have been more helpful.
“UMW doesn’t necessarily have a limit,” she told me. “We’re happy to have a letter of reference, but 10,000 words seems excessive. We put 500-word limits on applicants’ personal statements/essays.”
So there you have it. Not only does Mary Washington have something my young friend’s Utah school doesn’t—an NCAA men’s national basketball championship—but they also have a responsive Admissions department and humane word limits.
“Get Dirty!” as they’re fond of saying these days at UMW. “Go Wash!”
Sadly, UMW doesn’t have a football team or NIL money, so I understand why my young friend chose to bring his talents elsewhere. Fortunately, the fact that I fell about 9,500 words short in my character reference letter didn’t hurt his chances for admission.
As I’m writing this, he’s pushing a 45-pound weight up and down a football field eight times without stopping or standing. His new team opens their season on Sept. 5 against Idaho State, and the way I see it, if he gets on the field and they win, it’s all thanks to me.