Purdue University College of Liberal Arts

Information for

Department of English

Placement services

Please note that the guidelines for eligibility will be changing in the next few weeks.  Please check back to the site in mid June 2008 for the new guidelines before assuming the English department will handle your upcoming dossier requests for Fall 2008.

If you can answer yes to the following two questions you are eligible to use the services of the English Department's Placement Office:

  • Are/were you a J63 English graduate student? We only handle requests for English students. If you are/were a student of American Studies, Women's Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy, or Comparative Literature you must contact those offices for their Placement Procedures.
  • Did you graduate from the English Department with a M.A., M.F.A., or Ph.D. AFTER September 2004. We only handle requests for students who have graduated in the last 4 years.
General Information:
  1. Your dossier with the English department will include ONLY your confidential letters of recommendation. We do not copy c.v.'s, writing samples, nor provide transcript services. For your transcript requests, please see the Purdue Registrar's office website at: www.purdue.edu/registrar/
  2. When you place a request, EVERY letter in your file will be sent to the address you provide. You may request that a letter be removed PERMANENTLY from your file but it cannot be put "on hold" in your file.
  3. If you were on the job market in past years, you may want to request that your reviewers submit "new updated" letters to your file. If a newer version of a letter is recieved for your file the older letter will be discarded and replaced with the new one.
  4. Allow plenty of time to meet your deadlines. Eight weeks or more in advance of the date needed, you should request that professors submit their confidential letters of recommendation on departmental letterhead directly to the following address: Julie Henderson, Credential Coordinator, Department of English, 500 Oval Drive, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038.
  5. Once requests are placed, allow 2-3 working days for your request to be processed and at least two additional weeks for mailing. A record of your request and the dates when completed and mailed will be kept in your file.
  6. Faxing of your dossier can be requested only if an institution that you have applied to requests so. ALL REQUESTS MUST BE MADE THRU EMAIL, which should include the name, institution and fax number of the person requesting your dossier.

    Job Placement Resources webpage here
Before Submitting a Request:
  1. Have you signed a waiver relinquishing your right to review the letters in your file. If not, please send an email to jhenders@purdue.edu and she will send you a waiver. You need to sign a waiver only once--not every year you are on the market.
  2. Check and see the contents of your file. It is your responsibility to know what letters are currently in your file. Check with Julie at jhenders@purdue.edu and if all the expected letters are in your file you may then proceed with your request. If you place a request before all your letters have arrived it will be the responsibility of the reviewer (not Julie) to mail the letter to any institutions your dossier has already been sent to. You will have to provide them with a self-addressed stamped envelope for the mailing.
  3. A limit as to the number of dossier sent has been established. No more than 40 copies of your dossier will be mailed per year and no more than 120 copies per lifetime. If you are over the limit you will be notified and your file can be transferred to a dossier service of your choice.

Place a Request