Hi everyone,
I am planning to apply for a doctoral training programme. However, I have a problem with obtaining academic references since I received my Master's degree in 2005 from an European university. Although I was awarded the Academic Excellence Scholarship for five consecutive years and my thesis was marked as excellent, I don't think that anyone remembers me after 8 years. Now I am a final year student with The Open University, working towards my BA (Hons) but OU references will be pretty standard since it's a distance learning. Has anyone been in a similar position? What would you advise?
Thanks in advance.

I managed to gain an academic reference from one of my undergrad lecturers eight years after the fact. Strangely, my PhD University would only accept an undergrad reference and not one from my Masters.

If you stood out for any reason, they will remember you. If not, point out your Academic Excellence award and someone who lectured you should gladly oblige.

Although thankfully not mentioned in the reference, I was remembered particularly because I spilt a pot of uncured resin all over the polymer lab flaw. It made one hell of a mess!!! :-)

Ian (Mackem_Beefy)

Hi there,
Thank you for your post. I will contact my old uni but the chances of getting anything from them are rather slim :)

Sorry for the above message.

I'm sorry for the confusing :(. I think it is not difficult to obtain the reference letter just try to find the email address of your lectures and they will be positive towards that. They will just check ur records and will provide you with the reference letter.

Good luck
Aziz

I too am having problems getting a reference from my current course as tutors are so busy and now I'm worried as I've annoyed mine by chasing it up for the last 3 months, particularly when my dissertion has yet to be marked :-(. On the plus side, your OU tutor can give you a decent detailed reference by contacting them directly regardless of if you turned up for the optional tutorials (I didn't attend one in the whole 6 years!). I got an excellent ref from mine. I hope you get your reference, good luck x

I was in a similar position to you and I used the general OU reference plus one from a Level 3 Tutor. Despite my concerns, all 3 Universities that I applied to were fine with the combination.

Thank you all for your replies. They're very helpful!

Hi all,
In reference to the above discussion, I would just like to check what are the are the sub topics that are covered within the standard ou academic reference please?!
Thanks
Alison