Applications, fees, and recommendation forms.

girlgeekmom
Sun, 09 Dec 2012 21:21:54 +0000

Sorry URM, you’re not wrong.

You CAN visit and interview without paying the application fees. However, if you want to give your recommenders enough time to fill out forms, you do need to pay in order to “release” the rec forms (via the various systems). If it’s any comfort, we had to ask teachers to fill out SEVEN forms - there were only two schools we applied to that used a common rec form via Gateway, iirc.

The teachers we asked were used to filling out college rec’s, but if your child’s teachers are not used to the process, you might share what these teachers did, which was to open up a word-processing document and use it as a master form, adjusting to the various schools’ specific questions as needed. Most are fairly similar. Choate’s online form was beastly and many folks had a hard time cutting and pasting text (two years running, from what I’d been told by someone who had the same problem in the 2011-12 app cycle). I hear they’ve fixed it by now. At least one might hope so. Oh, also, Middlesex, if memory serves me, was also the only school to REQUIRE a foreign language teacher rec, if the student took a language (not all middle schoolers do).

It’s a bear of a process. And danged expensive for many of us.

Hang in there!