Benefits of a Peer Reference

xrCalico23
Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:21:12 +0000

As for you and your friend applying to the same school - personal anecdote: that was the exact situation with me and one of my friends last year. We attend a school where almost no one is accepted to very selective schools, yet both of us wanted to apply to MIT, Cornell, etc. Like you, we both assumed that our apps would be compared, perhaps even unintentionally, since we were the only ones from our high schools applying to colleges like MIT and we’ve been in almost all the same classes and had almost the exact same extracurricular interests. Decision time: both of us were accepted - and this is coming from a high schools where people are rarely accepted to the more selective schools. So, like others already said, the fact that someone else from your school is applying has little impact on your application.



Could both of us peer referencing each other turn that “competition” perhaps into a strength, as it might push those reading our applications, even slightly, to contemplate the idea of accepting us both (buy 1, take 1?).



Wait, do you mean you want the “peer reference” to come from the friend that you referenced before? But, if you write a reference for him/her and he writes one for you, then that kind of defeats the purpose of any peer recommendation…