Eastern European Guide to Writing Reference Letters | Hacker News Reader

Eastern European Guide to Writing Reference Letters

inference.vc

110 pointshunglee267 comments

I appreciate the author's intention to help.

But I can't but be annoyed by his stance that "I am at Cambridge", therefore the way I prefer things to be formulated is the correct, universally accepted way.

What's wrong with honest, no-nonsense recommendation letters? Why is flattering and positive language a requirement?

I am sure the author knows how to differentiate "you are doing brilliant work" coming from his mother vs coming from the leading researcher in his field, and interprets each version accordingly.

Similarly, what stops him interpreting "this is a good, promising, student" differently, depending of where it comes from?

And I agree on another point with the author, yes it is "excruciating" to read recommendation letters, and also, it is "excruciating" and soul-crushing to write them if you are not used to telling white lies, and it is also "excruciating" as a student to deal with getting one, especially in institutions where the professor-to-student power distance is much higher that in western universities.

This is intended for students that go to Cambridge, of course. I thought that was obvious from the article?

From the article "In summary, please take time to write strong recommendation letters for your best students."

"of course" and "obviously" it is not intended for students, but for professors writing recommendation letters for student that intend to go Cambridge.

I am an Eastern European that worked a lot for US companies (or generally the West). While it sounds like a no-nonsene attitude should work, I've found that being more salesy and positive works wonders when interacting with people from the US (I know Cambridge isn't the US, but it's likely similar in this aspect). This "I am not impressed by anything" attitude, results in you either omitting achievements that other candidates have listed and/or underselling the ones you would think of putting down. This makes you look worse than the benchmark. And the benchmark in the USA will always be skewed towards it's cultural lense.

I have to say "Eastern European" is a quite poor and unhelpful generalization nowadays.

It is ethnically and linguistically diverse: Slavic, Baltic, Finno-Ugric, Romance (Romania) as well as Albanian and Hellenic. It is religiously diverse: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Muslim and even the bastions of irreligion/atheism (Czechia and Estonia). There are significant cultural differences, especially comparing the more reserved north (Finland and Baltics) with the more emotional south (Balkans or even parts of Ukraine). There are also major economic differences, with central/north east being more or less high-income economies compared to the south and east-east. It even has inconsistent geographic definitions, e.g. whether it includes "Central Europe", whether it extends to Turkey or even Caucasus, etc.

Many generalizations really don't work for such a vast and diverse region.

In my perception (i come from Soviet Union), the most "East European" Eastern European country is Slovakia. When someone says "Eastern Europe" that's what comes to my mind. Czechia is too rich and too liberal, Poland is too religious and too conservative, Romania has too many issues with minorities and simply does not constitute a single picture (different parts of country look like different continents), Serbia is hopelessly stuck in the past and developed a hermit mentality, Hungary is a true oddball in every sense of it, but mainly is that it has it's own imperial past - not one of it's occupiers - so does not match the humble, hardworking and simple "East European" image.

>Romania has too many issues with minorities

What kind of issues and which minorities?

I think that will be politically incorrect to discuss in detail and will drive us way into downvoting territory...

Why? GP made some pretty bold claims on some nationalities("Romania has too many issues with minorities").

I expect some clarifications for those claims on what those issues are, so I can tell if knows what he's talking about and got right info from reputable sources or if he's just puling stuff out of his ass based on stereotypes and FUD he read on the internet.

Without any details or sources, such comments should be flagged.

And if you put details and sources you get flagged too. It’s a waste of time to discuss this kind of stuff.

Roma (also present in Slovakia and Hungary) and Hungarians mostly.

> also present in Slovakia and Hungary

And Bulgaria, and Serbia, ...

Yeah just listing the countries from the grand-parent comment. Their presence covers a lot of European countries (all the way to Italy and Spain in the west) kind of by definition, since they're a nomad population.

What are the issue with Hungarians in Romania? Besides political FUD.

armchair reader here - but I have 100 year old demographic information from the Hungarian region, in an article about language history. Each Hungarian province sub-division is split between four (or more) language groups - and the splits are quite uneven. Many of those groups had mass conflicts over the last thousand years.

> Many generalizations really don't work for such a vast and diverse region.

I think the right solution here is to divide the region into Central Europe, The Balkan Region, and The Western CIS and Caucasus:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Map-of-Eastern-Europ...

Nobody lives in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Everyone is Central European.

Now now, we Slovenians change that depending on who’s asking. Also time period.

Wanna talk economic prosperity, work ethic, and things of such nature? We’re Central European, basically German. Wanna talk partying, good food, sense of humor, and having fun? Proudly Balkan. Unless you want healthy food, then we are definitely Mediterranean. Oh good pizza and pasta? Yeah we’re basically Italian.

Funfact: It is unknown quite how large the Slovenian diaspora is because many emigrants wrote down “Austrian” before WW1 to escape slavic stereotypes in their new home.

> economic prosperity .. basically German

> Slovenia

I don't know mate, if Slovenia was so prosperous, then their workers wouldn't be driving 2h/day commuting to work and study in Austria for the chance of making 2k Euros/month. Or just moving to Germany, UK, Ireland, etc. for more. Every slovene I talked to seemed very unhappy about the wages/CoL ratio back home.

Oh it’s far more aspirational than real :D

With a tinge of “We work hard like the Germans! We’re not like those other people from the area. Please hire us”.

My understanding is that under Yugoslavia we were the most prosperous region by far. Then the export market collapsed and we realized “Shit, most of our economy is oriented towards former Yugoslavia!” and we started reorienting towards central europe.

But central europe has plenty other even cheaper markets to import from. So that’s been a problem.

IIRC "Central Europe" wasn't really in usage during the Cold War. The concept re-emerged after B.Wall fell.

None of that is really relevant for the post as written though, what were you trying to say?

I had a lot of experience working across mentioned boundaries and the post is very spot on with cultural differences between US and most cultures in Eastern European region. I'd also argue that Germans/Austrians easily fit into the same generalization and would benefit from reading it.

>what were you trying to say

I see this type of behavior a lot as of late, especially on HN. Mostly when someone says "I donated to X charity" then inevitably a brave contrarian comes out of the wood works to say that they could/should have done XYZ

I basically read it as a polite way of saying ‘I can’t work out how this comment relates to the article (which it should) and I would like to give you the opportunity to expand on the connection or restructure your comment to be related to the article instead of using the heading as an excuse to talk about some distantly related thing you care about.’ I could be wrong though.

I think it tends to give better results than just arguing about whether something is on topic and the parent commenter probably does have some more specific things they could say about Eastern Europe here.

I don’t believe I’ve witnessed something exactly like your example though I’ve seen plenty of disagreement on this site. I don’t think that’s what happened here.

Nobody counts Finland as part of their definition of "Eastern Europe".

A guy from South Africa once made the same argument about Sweden. Whether he was right or not, geographically speaking, does not really matter. We all know what everybody means. Nordic good, Eastern bad. Sadly, it's mostly true.

Geographic middle of Europe is somewhere in Poland. Seeing that Sweden is distinctly north of Poland, it makes total sense to count it as Northern European country.

Maybe I didn't make myself very clear. His point was that Sweden is in Eastern Europe.

Now you know how I feel reading all those articles about "Africa".

I was thinking the same thing, but about Asia.

This isn't a very helpful observation. By Eastern European, I presume he means the former Soviet Bloc. It has nothing to do with ethnicity, language, or culture, and everything to do with the lingering effects on organizational and academic behavior imposed by communist and totalitarian regimes. From Romania to Lithuania, this impact can have a remarkable consistency.

A lot of this advices are actually useful for some Western European people, at least France and Germany (and possibly Italy as well).

You just made some people’s heads pop off. Eastern Europe being diverse? High income economies? Some folks are stuck in little bubbles where they think of east europe as a weak backwards region. Until a war breaks out and half the world goes hungry, western europe scrambles without energy and some countries shiver at the thought of nuclear fallout. For better or worse east europeans should stick their heads up a bit more often.

Yeah, and 'Marta Somethingova' is... well, I'll just call it under-informed rather than anything else.

This also has the other side that an American style cv, for example, might be seen as "too positive" from eastern European perspective, and thus be ignored. That is; you read 10 CV's, all go through the roof of your superlative scale, therefore you ignore all of it, or consider all candidates as more-or-less equal and/or mediocre.

A common reaction is: It cannot all be positive.

Or, as a colleague of mine put it: "When I first interacted with americans, they were smiling so much I suspected they were trying to trick me in some way".

As an Eastern European, those permanent Hollywood smiles where they bare their teeth make me think of a dog threatening me :)

Re: reference letters and cultural clashes: "all in all a very good second-rate mathematician"

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/53122/mathematical-urban-...

I kinda feel thisn't about Eastern Europe, its USA vs the rest of the world. The "25 things British Say vs What they mean" meme is pretty similar. https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/25-things-britis...

I don't think it is -- the suggestion is that there's a spectrum of positivity, where Americans describe things very excitably and Eastern Europeans tend to be more modest. So we'd both be outside the norm from his point of view (the actual norm if you polled every English speaker would I guess be skewed a bit more in the American direction).

strange list - all of those phrases have the same way of functioning in America - cueing a listener to "read between the lines" and flip their meaning.

I appreciate the author of the article wanting to do good, but the last thing we need here in Eastern Europe is even more brain drain.

You just described how to get brain drain, by limiting the development of your students you will for ever be stuck with no outside influences. Students will often come home even if they get education abroad.

> Students will often come home even if they get education abroad.

Nope, that "often" part is false, at least when it comes to most of Eastern Europe (maybe in other parts of the world things are different).

This ONLY happens in countries with high salary ceilings: China, India, etc, or countries with high QoL despite low salaries: Southern Europe, Czechia.

Is it really that bad? I often see people who go back after the fourth postdoc/job, but I guess that is such a small group of people that it's more noticeable.

That's probably 0.0001% of people. And Romania has a super low amount of researchers from the get go, lower than EU average for sure.

After you invest in a good education abroad, you are definitely not going back home to put it to waste working for cronies or doing 'crisis management'. You're only going back home if you're outsourcing work from developed countries, competing on a new market with less players or getting prosecutor's office position and an opportunity to lock up some of the old boys.

It’s tragic so many of us have had to leave after 89. And I completely agree with you that this trend must be fought.

However, I also think helping students have better lives is good overall. Many of us come back later. Perhaps if in the future there is a political change back towards worker power, many more of us will come back. And we’ll have useful skills honed in the meantime.

So your students in some provincial eastern European university can barely get a C on an exam, trashing their GPAs in the process, closing life-long opportunities, because of the "only the professor deserves an A" attitude that then translates to reference letters and everywhere else. The same student then gets a 3.8+ GPA at a top 10 US university with glaring reviews of their work and 10x higher compensation the moment they decide to enter the industry. How are you going to stop the brain drain?

Not really, they get good results in school but so so domestic employment opportunities. Even in IT we're basically a country where work is being outsourced. Nobody is going to stop the brain drain, unless Eastern Europe economies grow to become G7 members, which is highly unlikely.

Political change? You're too optimistic. And about worker power, Eastern Europe is going to have a South Asia workforce soon. I met a couple of nice Bangladeshis this weekend. They are working in my country. I choose to welcome them, as they probably get enough mistreatment and xenophobia at work.

Political change will happen as the global crisis intensifies. Whether it’ll be towards fascism or towards socialism, we’ll see.

All workers can seize the means of production together, Eastern European and South Asian. It has happened before all over Eastern Europe, it can happen again.

Believe me it wont be this article that will cause a brain drain.

Yes, because hiding information is definitely going to slow down the brain drain.

"The Grand Canyon is ‘awesome,’ The Heavenly Cosmos are ‘awesome!’ This? Maybe interesting. But definitely not ‘awesome!’"

— Harlan Ellison

> Poor reference letters hurt students. They give us no insight into the applicant's true strengths, and no ammunition to support the best candidates in scholarship competitions or the admission process in general. I decided to write this guide for students so they can share it with their professors when asking for reference letters.

How about the university itself sharing the guide with professors when asking for a recommendation? Students have enough to do and adding more one on their list sounds ... odd.

The university is not directly in contact with the specific professors of its prospective students though?

When the Eastern European students ask their professors to write them a reference letter to Cambridge, the prospective students can point their professor to this guide. I'm not sure how else Cambridge is supposed to reach 'potential professors of potential prospective students'.

This is about references in academia. Very detailed, still a good read.

All of this holds true in private corporations as well. The baseline for praise is much much different between west coast and eastern europe which can be problematic in performance packets, reviews and general manager/employee communicaiton.

For us Eastern Europeans the takeaway is to exaggerate, exaggerate and when in doubt praise some more when talking to Americans. Otherwise, your reports or your own performance review might be viewed as very negative to people that have grown up on "shit sandwitch" type feedback and praise.

Culture Map is indeed a good book to read.

Kinda also reminds me of star ratings. For USA it seems 5 star is average. 4 star is bad.

Where as in other parts 5 star would be stellar.

This is why I never provide feedback to apps that involve people (e.g. ride "sharing" apps): Anything less than 5 stars is an internet slap in the face.

I'm fine with giving, say, books on Amazon a 3 or 4 star rating if they were basically "OK." But, yes, in a lot of contexts, anything other than a 5 star rating is considered bad and everyone knows that fact so more than a few "only" 4 star ratings and the Uber driver gets kicked off the service, the AirBnB owner loses their superhost status, or someone misses out on their bonus.

Even so...

As someone who deals with a lot of PhD applications I have to say I pay very little attention (if any) to reference letters. Nonetheless, if I were to then this seems like sound advice.

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