AS A PEOPLE SUFFERED A LOT IN APPLICATIONS AND AT LAST GOT WHAT I WANT, I'D LIKE TO SHARE SOME OF MY EXPERIUENCES AND IDEAS IN RECOMMENDATIONS , TO HELP THOSE HONORABLE NEW COMERS, AND THOSE WHO ARE SEPARATED, BY ANY REASON , LIKE MY WIFE AND ME.
In my opinion, the most important thing in application differs much from people people, from school to school. But generally speaking, they will consider all the materials they have and at last, if there ARE STH VERY OUTSTANDING CONCERNING you, they will surely give you what you want.
Among the most important things, including recommendaiotns, transcripts, score in GRE and Tofel, the most common standard is that TRANSCRIPT, TOFEL, GRE SUB, GRE GENERAL, then the recommendation.
The recommendation becomes the most trivial thing in this procession is because:
(1) USA professors seems already know that few letters were written by faculty members, they are always the work of students'.
(2) There are few professors in china which are famous and willing to write recommedations for students who is going out.
(3) Most professors are not so famous as to be useful in deciding the students' being admitted or not.
But we have some exceptions here. When you are lucky enough to find a famous professor, famous to be known by many professors in USA, Acedamy members are not enough in this issue though. To provide a instance, like Zhang Dainian, Chen daisun, or Zhou Guangzhao, or some people who are very close friend or holding close relations with the professors you are applying, these peoples recommendations will be extremely useful.
Anyway, the recommendations are required in the applications, so we need to choose the recommendations and the people to write it. There are 6 kinds of recommendations, each is worse then the next one.