Supervisor letters for an ophthalmology ST1 portfolio

A supervisor letter is the cheapest thing on the whole form. It needs no new work, only a request, and it is what turns work that might score into work that does.

It is also the thing most often wasted. Ask a supervisor for a letter and what usually comes back is warm and general: a pleasure to work with, showed real enthusiasm. That is a reference. An assessor cannot award points against it.

This post is about asking for the other kind. It assumes you have already decided the work is worth claiming, which is a separate decision.

What the letter is actually for

An assessor awards points against an evidence type. They read your item, they check it against the stated conditions of that evidence type, and they decide whether one meets the other. Where the fit is obvious the letter adds nothing: a PubMed-cited paper needs nobody to vouch for it.

Where the fit is not obvious, the letter is the whole difference. Teaching you delivered without anyone issuing a certificate. An audit where your role was real but unclear on paper. A taster week nobody documented. The work happened. What is missing is somebody other than you saying what it was.

So the letter has one job: to state, in terms an assessor does not have to interpret, how the work meets the evidence type. The webinar's rule for presenting any item is to make it effortless for an assessor to award the points, and a letter is that rule applied to work the paperwork does not speak for on its own.

Put the title inside the letter

Rule 10 of the sixteen says to title each letter for the domain it supports. What is worth adding is where the title goes: inside the letter, on its own line at the top, and not only in the name of the file. There it travels with the document whatever the file ends up being called, and it is the first thing read rather than something an assessor has to come back out of the document to see.

Use the evidence folder's own wording for the domain rather than your own summary of it. The title is doing routing, so it should match the words the person marking is already looking for.

Where one supervisor can speak to two items in different domains, ask for two letters. One letter carrying both can only have one title, and a title trying to name two domains routes to neither.

What it has to say

Four things, and the first is the one that gets left out.

1. How the work meets the evidence type. Not that the work was good. That it satisfies the conditions of the specific line you are claiming, named.
2. What you actually did. Your role, specifically. "Contributed to" is the phrase to watch for, because an assessor cannot tell from it whether you led the project or sat in the meetings.
3. Dates, setting and duration. The rules ask for these on most clinical and project claims, and a letter without them sends an assessor looking for a second document.
4. Who is writing, and in what capacity. Their role, their relationship to the work, and a signature. Third-party evidence is only third-party if the third party is identifiable.

A template to send

Do not ask a supervisor to write this from nothing. Send a skeleton with the facts already in it, so that what is left for them is the part only they can supply.

Square brackets mark the slots. Fill in the ones you can verify yourself before you send it: names, dates, setting, what you did. The last two slots are not yours.

[Domain, as the evidence folder names it]: [the item, in a few words]

I am [supervisor name], [supervisor role] at [institution]. I supervised [your name] in [capacity] between [start date] and [end date].

[Your name] [what you did, in plain terms: designed, delivered, led, collected, analysed, presented]. This took place at [setting] and involved [duration, or how often and over how long].

[Supervisor to complete: how this work meets the requirements of the evidence type named in the title]

[Supervisor name, role, signature, date]

Those last two slots are the point of the whole exercise. A letter is third-party evidence, and what makes it worth anything is that somebody other than you is confirming what happened. So tell them which evidence type you are claiming and send its exact wording, then let them write the confirmation, change what you have put above it, or decline. A letter you drafted and they signed unread is not third-party anything, whatever it says on it.

How to ask

One message, three things: the filled-in skeleton, the evidence type's wording, and the date you need it by. The middle one is what gets left out, and it is why letters come back vague. Nobody can confirm a requirement they have not been shown.

Ask early. A letter requested three days before the deadline is a letter written in a hurry as a favour, and it reads that way. Ask while there is still room to go back a second time.

If the claim also wants a reflection, write that yourself. The evidence folder asks for one in some places and not others, so check which before you write anything.

What not to do

Do not chase a letter for work that will not score anyway. No letter makes an item meet an evidence type it does not meet, and carrying the item costs you something either way: what goes in and what stays out has the published version of that.

Do not settle for the warm one. If the letter comes back general, go back and be specific about what is missing: which evidence type you are claiming, and what about the work you need them to address. That is a smaller request than the first one was.

Where to go next

The sixteen unwritten rules put letters in the context of everything else: rule 4 on borderline work, rules 10 and 11 on titling and wording. For the evidence rules a letter has to satisfy, see what the ophthalmology ST1 portfolio actually requires.