Graduate school/undergrad. Apples to kiwi fruit. And a “STEM” designation (originally designed as an immigration workaround to increase the length of the LPT/OPT work permit) has nothing to do with admissions.
But what if the student has already submitted the application & the two recommendations are solid “9+, best student of my career” recommendations but from two similar academic disciplines. Wouldn’t it just best to just submit a third one?
So is finance theory vs. financial management. This applicant is a future trader/quant jock with a 790 on the SAT math. He’s not seeking kiwi fruit.
Let’s stay grounded in reality rather than hypotheticals. The likelihood of a applicant submitting every application two months early is negligible. Even in that unlikely scenario, half-baked essays submitted prematurely would hurt their Ivy odds far more than an extra recommendation letter could ever mitigate.
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If I had a dollar for every HS kid who thought they’d be a “quant jock”…
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No, not necessarily. Is the third one going to add anything at all? No way for the student to know that. It’s wasted effort on everyone’s part if a third letter adds nothing, which IME is likely (opinion from someone who has read 25000+ LoRs.)
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Let’s not crush the aspiration at age 17. Every HS kid will eventually find his/her path in college.
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Not crushing at all.
Pointing out that logic must prevail at some point. And adding a third recommendation-- to “signal” that the kid is STEM, because in certain, limited circumstances quant finance is considered STEM… is just illogical. Why not help the OP instead of encouraging further perseverating on a non-problem?
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A lot of the kids who end up in quant finance have not thought of quant finance as a career in HS, and probably even in the first year of college. And a lot (most) of them are not finance majors.
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But what if the second recommendation has already been written & submitted. The second recommender wasted his/her time writing this.
And in the this case, it could be viewed as coming from two similar academic disciplines. In not submitting a “non-math” recommendation, whether it’s a replacement for the second or an additional one, would this hurt his chances at the Ivys?
So many what ifs and hypotheticals.
If OP wants to get a third LoR they can. For schools where OP hasn’t submitted apps the third LoR could become the second.
IMO there are very few schools where the current two LoRs could be an issue. And IMO again it’s not the Ivies. No reason for OP to stress, or be fearful.
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I’ve written before about the geology major who was my best quant hire of all time.
Had never taken a finance class; didn’t know what valuation was. The MD’s went nuts over him. But predicting seismic activity-- with a far better model than the ones used at the time by oceanographers and geologists around the world- is apparently a more valuable skill than ANYTHING you can learn in an undergrad finance class!
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We had submitted more than 2 teacher reccs where more than 2 were allowed, and it did not hurt. Sometimes the counsellor letter summarized other reccs when only two teacher reccs were allowed.
I’ve heard the same thing about a few physics majors.
A lot of these kids can spell word the “stock” going in. That is about it. Briefly one of the firms that I heard about, considered not looking at kids that had the word “finance” in their resume, because they found that from a data science exercise over 10 years of resumes, that kids who had the word finance in their resumes did poorly thereafter at the job. Some of the debate now is whether you want more mathy kids or more CS kids, and whether you can still take a pure math kid who can’t code at all – in the past they ignored the lack of CS skills.
Changing the hypothetical doesn’t alter the answer. Tangential “whataboutisms” do nothing to help the OP navigate their actual circumstances. Please keep the discussion grounded in real-world scenarios that directly apply to the topic.
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This is what I think.
IMHO at least based on what I have seen the way to get admitted to a highly selective / highly ranked university is to be sincere and genuine. Just be yourself. Whatever you do, do it well. This looks like exactly what OP has done.
This kid is interested in quantitative stock trading. As already mentioned above, he has 790 on the math SAT test and a 4.0 unweighted GPA. He already submitted two letters of reference from teachers from classes that one might think of as quantitative / math-related.
I think he will get accepted to some very good universities. I think that he will be accepted to some schools that are a good fit for him. Whether any of his acceptances will be to schools that happen to be in the Ivy League, I have no idea.
The question in my mind is whether he should submit a third letter of reference to those schools that specifically require a humanities oriented reference. I think that this requires carefully reading the guidance on the web page of each university he is applying to. Given the length of his list of schools, this could take some effort.
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If you thought those would be the best teachers to speak to your work in the classroom, I suspect that was your best choices (even if, in theory, it may have been ideal to have one non-STEM teacher).
Also, what is done is done. You will never know why you got in, or not. I suspect this will make no difference at all. I wouldn’t add a new one at this point for many reasons.
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Just noting I agree we really need some clarity on whether the OP actually submitted their RD applications already.
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