The Sunday Eight O'Clock/His Recommendation
THERE was a letter in the mail yesterday from a firm in Chicago asking me to recommend McGuire. The requirements were that he should be a man of honesty and integrity with energy and initiative. It was a hard rôle for Mac to play, and I laid the letter aside to ponder over my answer and its phrasing. I wanted to be both truthful and kind.
Mac was the sort of man who doesn't care what people think. He expected to get by through his own cleverness and adroitness rather than by honest effort. He never worked unless he had to do so, and then as little as possible. If I had ever wanted him suddenly, I should have sought him in the most frequented loafing place about the campus. He was "no student", he admitted, but he was sure he was "getting as much out of the course as some of these grinds." There had occasionally been some doubt as to whether what Mac got from the course came from his own brain or from some one else's paper, but he had never really been caught.
His written exercises were carelessly done and usually late; if he felt that he could pass the course without it, they were never written at all. He was a man of excuses, desiring always extensions and special privileges. No, I could not say that he was honest, and though he had brains, he had neither energy nor initiative. He was in reality an unreliable loafer, and a difficult man to recommend.
A friend of mine once said to a young fellow who had asked him for a letter of recommendation, "If you will write one about yourself that is true and complimentary, I will sign it." I think, perhaps, it is not a bad test of a man's character for him to sit down and fairly and honestly analyze his qualifications, to see if there is anything he could write about himself that is true and complimentary, to put down in black and white the real personal facts, and then face them.
If your work in college has been irregular, commonplace, and sometimes a failure; if you have been delighted merely to get by; if you have gained the reputation of being a loafer rather than a grind, of being a clever shifty fellow rather than straightforwardly square and honest, the man who writes your recommendation will also have a hard time.
What could you say about Mac, if you were called upon to write a letter of recommendation for him; and what could you write about yourself?
August