The Ideal Chemistry Student:
Written as a letter of recommendation
To Whom It May Concern:
I am writing this letter in support of Ester Isomer, a student who has just graduated from the
Carleton College chemistry department. Ester was in a number of my courses, and I have had
many opportunities to interact with her during her career at Carleton. Ester has always done very
well in her courses (see her G.P.A.) and has shown a remarkable ability to connect the topics in
her various courses. She sees the connections between her academic experiences, is able to bring
knowledge from one area into another, and, most importantly, to connect her knowledge from
outside of her chemistry courses to that which she does in class. Overall, she knows how to
approach problems as a mature chemist would; she knows how to ask good questions, and she
knows where to go to start getting answers, whether they are found in the literature, found in
conversation with other chemists, or found through experimentation in the laboratory.
Let me describe Ester’s abilities in the context of some of the courses she has taken. She has
experience working with many chemical theories and principles (e.g. applications of
thermodynamics, kinetics, equilibrium, energy, and atomic and molecular theory), and she has
been able to integrate various of these theories, as appropriate, to describe physical phenomena
observed both in classes and in the laboratory. She is skilled at using evidence to evaluate
situations and inform her decisions. She has gained experience using many of the modern
analytical techniques, such as NMR, MS, UV-VIS, IR, and basic separation techniques, and she
has brought specific of these techniques to bear on projects in various places in her academic
career. For example, as a first year student, Ester engaged with a partner in a 2 week
independent project in each of Principles of Chemistry and Equilibrium and Analysis. These
projects gave Ester and her partner opportunities to take the skills and ideas from the course and
lab in which they were engaged and try them out on a system of their choosing. The projects
were self-directed, and required learning the details of the system they were investigating. Both
of these projects culminated with a presentation to the class or the professor, respectively. In
each project, Ester showed mastery of what she did and why she did it, and an attention to detail
that characterizes her approach in all courses in which I have worked with her, since. She easily
seems to understand where she could go further, had she had more time, and she presented her
work in a confident and clean way.
Ester had a more significant opportunity for an independent project, also with a partner, after
declaring her major, in the Chemical Kinetics Laboratory. This project required Ester and her
partner to navigate the chemical literature and to find a publication that described an experiment
in which measurements of chemical kinetics were used to understand a system. Most of these
projects come from the J. Chem. Ed., and Ester and her partner chose a project that they were
interested in, but which they didn’t know much about. They chose a technique that required
them to work with some instrumentation that is known to be finicky, and they were energized by
this opportunity! Although the project didn’t work well all the time, and the information
presented in the paper was not always borne out in their experiments, Ester and her partner
worked together well to push the edges of the information in the paper they were following, and