Letter of Recommendation

Exactly three months ago, I asked my journalism professor to write me a letter of recommendation for the summer internships I was applying for. I took two classes with him, but I got an A in one and a C in the other. I did not know how he would react, but he graciously agreed. A few days later, he asked me to pick up the sealed envelope in his mailbox. When I went back to my room, I do not know what took over me, but I broke his vote of confidence by opening it and reading it.

Pay close attention. This was his letter of recommendation:

3/20/06

To Whom It May Concern:

I can recommend Yih-Kang Lee as an earnest, hard-working young woman who welcomes constructive criticism and has the ability to learn from it. She took both my magazine and news writing classes at Emory University. As a three-time author and former writer at Business Week, I raise the bar high in my classes. No matter how high I raised it, Yih always stretched herself to meet my high standards. She was among my top students in both classes.

What impressed me most was how much progress Yih made during her first class with me. Her writing was weak when she entered the course, but she took my critiques to heart. No one worked harder in mastering the techniques of news writing. By the end of the course she was an A student. In magazine writing, she was the only sophomore among a class full of juniors and seniors. Not only did she hold her own but scored one of the few As in the class.

Yih was never a wallflower. She has an active and engaging mind, and she thought deeply about all we talked about in class. Nor was she shy about joining any discussion. But she was never impolite, always listening intently and giving opposing arguments their due.

Class wasn’t the only venue Yih strove to improve her writing. She has worked at Emory magazine. Now she plans to turn her class work for me into an article that could be published professionally. I have ever confidence she will succeed.

Despite Yih’s many extracurricular activities, her class work never suffered. She showed a mature ability to juggle many balls at the same time without dropping any. She would be a valuable addition to any rigorous fellowship or endeavor.

Yours truly,

MY PROFESSOR'S NAME

Lecturer

Journalism Program

Emory University

I hope you did not laugh too hard. So what did I do? Now I face a predicament. I needed to send the letter of recommendation. To change the "she"s to "he"s would be a breach of confidence and another form of plagiarism. To confront my professor about it would not only be embarassing for both parties, but it would also let him know that I opened the signature-sealed envelope. To not do anything about it was to turn in an incmoplete application.

I was going to confront him the next day. But two hours before the meeting happened, I received a phone call from CNN, who then promptly told me that I had been accepted. Thus, my meeting with my professor wound up being, "Thank you for your guidance. I got an internship at CNN."

I thought that was the end of the story. But it was not.

As I'm in the middle of one internship, I am in the middle of applying to several more. And guess what they need in my application. Yep -- a letter of recommendation. Considering I have had a limited number of journalism professors in Emory, I decided to email him again. I thanked him for his previous help and asked for another copy of the letter through email. I hoped that he would catch his mistake and send me a revised copy, where I, am in fact, a male.

He did not notice. He sent the same letter of recommendation to me.

This time around, I have more options. Unlike the previous predicament, I had the right access to open the attachment to print. Therefore, I just sent him an email with the following:

"Thank you for your quick replies. But I think the recommendation you sent is wrong. Though it does have my name, some of the "information" is inaccurate."

I now await his reply. I now await a more awkward teacher-student relationship than Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate.

But at least this time around, my gender will be corrected.