This quarter, you will be the perfect students. This professor is going to love you in a completely appropriate and recommendation-friendly way. You raise your hand and participate at every opportunity. The only problem? You might just be sabotaging yourself in your over-the-top attempts to win your prof over.
“You can tell the bullshitters from those who aren’t,” Medill professor Eric Ferkenhoff says.
Conventional wisdom tells us that to stand out, we need to be seen and heard. In a lecture hall setting, this often translates to “see my hand fly up and hear me share my opinion.” While professors appreciate input, other, simple things – like politeness, passion and respect – can leave a more lasting (and more positive) impression.
Shut up once in a while.
For RTVF professor Scott Curtis, starting out on the right foot means remembering not to call him by his first name before graduation. For Curtis, winning a professor over is all about manners and earnestness. He advises students to resist the urge to contribute for the sake of contributing and to keep their fellow classmates in mind during group discussions.
“You don’t want anyone who dominates or who is just talking to hear themselves talk,” he says. “Politeness means recognizing other people and if you find that other people aren’t contributing as much, then maybe you need to back off just a little bit….Not thinking just in terms of ‘me and the instructor,’ but in terms of ‘me and the rest of the people around me.’”
English professor Frances Paden agrees that thinking terms of the classroom collective and making contributions that encourage contributions from others makes teachers happy.
“When students are generous and intelligent with both the text and their classmates, they’ll probably see me smile,” she says.
Convey passion.
If you hold back in discussion, how are you ever going to stand out to that professor you admire so much? Ferkenhoff says passion will make you shine even if you aren’t the discussion leader. Passion also translates to a higher grade – not because professors show favoritism toward the passionate, but because the passionate produce better work.
“Medill is such an elite school,” he says. “It’s filled with students who are so bright, so smart, so deserving of being here, and the person who doesn’t care and doesn’t want to put in that effort – that doesn’t put them on my bad side, that doesn’t mean they’re going to be graded down, but it comes across. If they don’t care, that shows up in the reporting and the writing and therefore it reflects on their grade.”
Yes–go to office hours.
Curtis advocates taking advantage of office hours to convey real passion to a professor. This doesn’t mean inventing an excuse to stop by or asking questions to which you already know the answer. Curtis says the students who stand out are those who use office hours as a forum to discuss ideas.
“The students I remember most and the students I’ve helped the most are the ones who have come to my office hours and talked with me,” he says. “Office hours can be a good way to really forge a bond with a professor outside of the lecture hall.”