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LaTeX recommendation letter template

A reference letter in the structure admissions and hiring committees expect: how you know the candidate, a concrete comparison ("first among sixty students"), specific evidence, and an unreserved close.

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Page 1 of the Recommendation template, compiled with pdfTeX
Page 1, compiled with pdfTeX. This is the actual output.

Who it's for

For recommenders writing about someone else. For your own application letter, use the cover letter template.

How to customize this template

  1. Replace the letterhead with your name, title, department, and email.
  2. Open with how long and in what capacity you have known the candidate.
  3. Give one ranking or comparison and one concrete story. Committees discount letters that only praise in general terms.
  4. Swap the candidate's name throughout with the editor's search and replace (Ctrl/Cmd-F).

When it looks right, press Download PDF. To take the .tex to Overleaf or a local TeX install, choose Export → LaTeX source.

The first lines of the source

\documentclass{letter}

\begin{document}

Your Name \\
Department of Computer Science \\
Fairview University \\
you@university.edu

\hfill \today

\bigskip
To the Admissions Committee,

\bigskip
I am delighted to write in strong support of Robin Kessler's application. I have known Robin for three years, first as a student in my graduate Machine Learning Theory course and subsequently as a research collaborator on sparse attention mechanisms for transformer models.

\bigskip
…

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