Letter Of Recommendation Sample For Former Employee 2 (Page 4 of 5) in pdf

Graduate Scholarship Recommendation

OCTOBER xx, 20xx

To the UCD School of Film Application Committee:

Letter of Support for John Lerner’s UCD Graduate Scholarship

Perhaps the most memorable discussion I’ve ever had with a student about his decision to switch

majors was three years ago. The student was a first-year Polymer Science and Engineering major on a

scholarship, taking my introductory film class as an elective, and he told me he was considering a switch to

Film. Assuming that this student was simply running into typical academic problems in first-year chemistry

and physics courses, I asked how those courses were going. “Oh, I’m getting As in those,” he assured me

with a calm wave of his hand. “But I long to study Film.” That student was John Lerner.

Since that time, I’ve worked with John as a mentor on several of his papers for classes ranging

from honors composition to film history and theory. In my seven-year career as a film instructor, no

student has been more delightful to work with than has John. His papers are always creative, self-styled,

skillful, and analytical. I quote from a creative essay he wrote during his first year of study, spoofing

college philosophy and psychology classes by claiming that he got through them simply by peppering in

quotations from Ingmar Bergman films: “When my philosophy professor asked me to explain human

reactions to fear, I snapped, ‘In our fear, we make an image, and that image we call God.’ I got an A in the

course.” Later, John as a character in the essay discovers that he can arbitrarily quote Bergman films to

advance his personal relationships as a college student as well, in that college is “a world full of fake

intellectuals.”

This is not to say that John’s work is too quirky or sardonic to thrive in the traditional academic

arena. Another paper he wrote for a film class on Francois Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine clearly

demonstrates his facility with formal analysis. In this paper, John compares Truffaut’s life to his art (a

staple of film criticism, certainly), but he does not trot out sophomoric insights—rather he analyzes

crisply and complexly, embracing principles of paradox, juxtaposition, technique. One sees John’s gift for

language and analytical focus from the first line of the paper: “The tap of his cane is heard before the first

appearance of the boy on screen—almost an apparition of Antione Doinel—hustling down the sidewalk

toward an imposing set of vertical bars.” In this paper and others I’ve reviewed with John, it’s clear that

he has mastered the art of student paper writing, and he is just as comfortable with a formal analysis of

film noir as he is with dropping in cultural references to vernacular English or Groucho Marx.

I turn to these examples of John’s work so prominently not because I lack other kinds of

evidence, but because as I read his work I am so impressed with the richness and diversity of his talents.

More personally, I have had numerous opportunities to match my opinion of John’s work with that of his

character. I’ve been intrigued and moved by conversations with him about his three adopted siblings. I’ve

spoken with his peers about the particular sensibility that he brings to discussions in his classes, and I’ve

spoken with his other professors about him, one of whom reports that he consistently “raises the tenor of

class discussion greatly.” As a lover of film and a screenplay author, I have enjoyed many relaxed

conversations with John about both film and script writing. As his writing mentor, I have discovered that

he is willing to do complete retooling of a script that is off the mark, or that I need only briefly

characterize a trend in his work for his jaunty mind to apply it to self-improvement.

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