Recycled: Letters of Recommendation

Grad school is kicking my butt. So in an effort to keep this blog semi-active over the next few months, until I at least get my legs underneath me to start generating new content, I'll be recycling many of my old posts about the MFA application process. This information is a year old, but I think still very relevant for the upcoming 2009 application season. This post was put up on October 18, 2008. It covers my brief and neurotic thoughts on the art of recommendations. Specifically, why you should use physical letters of recommendations over electronic ones. Though I'm sure that emailed recommendations are perfectly fine, too. Enjoy!

My recommendation materials have been, to quote Stevie Wonder, "signed, sealed, and delivered" to my recommendors and I feel great. You'd think that such a thing would be a simple enough affair -- ask your three people to write you some letters -- but as I found out in my research, recommendations, if done properly and on time, are a complicated affair. Can you accommodate the timeline of all of your recommendors? What level of involvement should you have with your recommendors? But out of all the questions I had to answer, the one that was the far most difficult to answer was whether I wanted to send the materials to my recommendors by paper or email.

You might notice that nowadays most major schools encourage their applicants to use their online applications. And in general, this is a great idea, for both the school and the applicant. There's little to no paper or ink used, the computerized applications have a far less likely hood of being lost or delayed, etc. These schools even extend their online capabilities to recommendations. It seems simple enough. Just enter your recommendor's information into an online form, and the school's system will email them instructions on how to upload their letters online. Maybe even answer a couple questions. No muss, no fuss, right? Maybe. When I sat down and really thought about what was being asked of each of my recommendors, I began to realize how daunting the process was going to be. I'm applying to fourteen schools -- which means fourteen customized letters, fourteen cover sheets, fourteen different forms or general questions each school is asking. And while it would seem easy enough to put that into email terms -- electronic forms are easier to handle than paper ones, right? -- several problems rear their heads. For starters, if my email inbox is any indication of how most people keep and organize their emails, then I couldn't realistically expect my recommendors to keep track of each of the fourteen emails the schools would be sending them. Plus, we'd be talking about fourteen emails in the span of 1-2 hours (logging into a school's account and filling out all 3 recommendors' information takes at least 5-10 minutes each), not all at once. If I'm sending emails to someone's account over the span of 1-2 hours, then we'd be talking about fourteen emails intermixed with perhaps a dozen or so other personal emails. And on top of all that consider this note, which is a warning that some schools, like Notre Dame and the University of Indiana, put during their email submission process: Please note that notification emails will indicate "University of Notre Dame - the Graduate School" as the sender but will come from support@ApplyYourself.com. If they use a spam-blocking tool, please ask them to add this email address to their list of known/safe addresses. What? Spam-blockers? What kind of email account doesn't have some form of spam blocking software in this day and age? The opportunities for an email or two slipping through the cracks are simply too great.

I understand that at this point, I probably sound like a raving paranoid lunatic, but consider this: Whose job is it to make the process as simple and easy as possible? Whose job is it to make sure all the letters are received and sent on time without fuss? If a school or two falls through the cracks, who's going to worry about it -- you or the recommendor? Certainly, if your recommendor is a decent human being -- and they all are, or we wouldn't ask them to write us words of praise -- then they might ask about where this or that school's email went, but would you really expect them to look out for your big picture? At the end of the day, you are your own greatest advocate. It's as simple as that. And if you don't do the dirty work, if you don't follow up and make sure that what needs to be done actually gets done, then no one else will.

Which is why I decided to go low-tech and send out the letters by paper. One big package, with all fourteen envelopes and the correct cover letters, and one big manila envelope inside for them to mail the entire thing back to me when they're done. And when I get them back, I'll know exactly where they're going and when, and if something goes wrong, it'll be because I didn't do something right. Am I a control freak? Most certainly. But I'd rather put it in my hands than someone else's.