<p>Hey guys,</p>
<p>I’m applying for a Master of Architecture degree at approximately 5 different schools.</p>
<p>Here’s what I’m concerned about:</p>
<p>Some of the schools require recommender forms to go with each recommendation, but 2 of my recommenders now live overseas, so I’m unable to get them to complete these forms.</p>
<p>Do you think submitting the recommendations without the forms will suffice?</p>
<p>Thanks,</p>
<p>Grant</p>
<p>I would be vary wary about not including the necessary forms because that would be a very poor first impression with an admissions committee. How long do you have before your application deadline? I had one recommender abroad, so I just posted all the necessary forms to him with pre-addressed envelopes. I believe it only took about 2 weeks from the time I mailed him the forms to the time the schools received the completed forms. (Somehow international first class mail is faster than domestic first class mail.) If you have a couple of weeks before the deadlines, then I would strongly suggest filling out the forms properly. Worst case scenario, you could just e-mail the forms to your recommenders and have them fill out the top portion of the recommendation form that the applicant should fill out. Have you contacted the department about this concern/problem?</p>
<p>Let’s put it this way:
Do you want your application to be the one that irritates the committee because it lacks the proper forms?</p>
<p>Ok, thanks guys. I sorted that stuff out.</p>
<p>Couple more questions:
I’m busy filling out the application forms and I find a couple questions intriguing:</p>
<p>Firstly: They ask me to list other graduate schools I’m applying to.
Why? Is it necessary for me to tell them? Will it help my cause in any way?</p>
<p>Also, I just wrote my GRE and scored 460 for Verbal and 710 for Quant.
Very poor on the english side. Will this be of massive detriment to my application? Keeping in mind I’m applying for an Architecture degree</p>
<p>thanks!</p>
<p>Listing the other schools to which you are applying will neither help nor hurt you, but it is very helpful to the program to which you are applying.</p>
<p>This is because departments and grad programs must do self-assessments (benchmarking) with regularity, and it is critical to this process to identify one’s competitors. We need to know what other programs our applicants are looking at, and which of these programs they choose over ours. The only way we can get that data is from applicants. </p>
<p>I cannot answer your second question in any definitive way, but I think your verbal score will be fine. If you are not a native English speaker, you will be more than fine.</p>