In my quest to travel to Germany with a foreign study program, I was met with a unique challenge: a letter of recommendation. I've always felt very awkward asking people for letters of recommendation because it asks a lot of the person. Not so much effort-wise, but it's a very trusting request. It silently says to the person being asked, "I like you and I trust you and I hope you like me enough to tell this other person or organization how awesome I am and why you love me." It's not the clearest bond you share with someone, so I feel as though it can easily be misconstrued to where the asker thinks there's a stronger bond than the askee. So when I was asked to find people to write a letter of recommendation, I was fortunate enough to have a perfect candidate in mind: my communication professor.

I took a small group communication course from this professor last semester and had a really great experience. I could tell from the start that he was very passionate about the subject he was teaching, which is a really special quality to see in a teacher. Because of this, everything we were learning about felt personal and significant. He urged us to take the lessons with us outside the classroom and apply them to our lives because it's possible to do that with communication lessons. As we learned in the class, communication is in literally everything we do and we "can't not communicate." Anyway, his class really opened my eyes to the world; so much I looked for his other classes when registration rolled around. I'm now in another one of his classes and he remembers me from last semester.

I asked him to recommend me to the program I was applying for and he said of course he would. On the form I gave him to fill out, I had the choice to look at the sheet or not, and I chose not to. About a week later he approached me in class with an envelope saying even though I said I didn't need to see the recommendation, he wanted to give me that choice. So I went home after my classes and opened up the envelope. When I looked inside, I saw two sheets of paper: the recommendation form I was provided by the program and a personal letter. Not only did he fill out the form, he took the initiative to write an entire letter for me.

I won't share exactly what he wrote, but I just want to say how great it was. Compliments are in such short demand and the ones we do get are usually very shallow or fast. "I like your shoes!" "Well thank you, I did spend all of ten minutes selecting these specific sacks of material to contain my feet." I know these surface level compliments can be nice, but how often do we really praise the people close to us? When was the last time you heard something like, "You're one of the kindest people I know?" What about, "I'm so grateful to have you in my life?" Anything like that is unfortunately uncommon. But the feeling when hearing it is indescribable. To know that my professor saw my effort, respects me as a person, and values my presence and input is so reassuring. I've only known this man for about ten months (four of which were over the summer) spending 2.5 hours with him a week but he still went above and beyond any expectations to provide me with a glowing recommendation. Not even my closest friends are keen on doing this for me too often, and I'm sad to say that I don't do it enough either.

I want anyone who reads this to change this. It's so easy to tear others down or not say anything at all, but it takes real courage and strength of character. It's so sad that we don't do it more because we all desperately need to hear good things about ourselves. There's an epidemic of depression and feelings of inadequacy at least partially stemming from out aversion to vulnerability and willingness to put others up. We really should be encouraging others and letting them know how amazing they are. Doing so might just change both lives.