With the four years undergraduates study at UNC and the thousands of dollars they, their parents, the state and the federal government have put up for them to do so, one would hope an educator or two made an impact.
Ideally, those educators introduced you to new ways of being in the world, methods of solving small and large problems and the ability to pose new and hard questions of your surroundings and those in power over them and you. At the very least, those educators made your writing better, gave you a job skill or two and knocked you down to build you up a bit.
As many at UNC get ready to graduate, you owe it to yourselves and your best educators to reconnect. Educators suffer crises of confidence more often than you realize. A kind word saying they helped you means the world.
It is also a potentially beneficial one.
Recommendations are the lubricant that allows entry into further portals of institutional life. Educators are much more likely to give you a standout recommendation if you spoke in class and did your homework.
But if you come back well before a last-minute recommendation is needed and tell educators what your plans are, how they influenced them and how they can help, they are usually more than willing to oblige. Let’s be honest with ourselves: A little good-natured brown-nosing likely is a part of how you got in here. A little more on the way out can’t hurt.
