Lets talk letters of recommendation

Marbleheader
Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:36:02 +0000

At our high school - thru Naviance - the kids pick one teacher to ask for a recommendation during junior year. That teacher, plus the guidance counselor, write the letters, and they are “electronically” delivered to the college/university, if they accept electronic submissions of letters of recs., transcripts, and the high school’s profile. It is great to be able to go on Naviance and see what documents have been sent and what’s pending (if a teacher hasn’t done the rec. yet, etc).

I don’t think - but I am NOT sure - that you can have additional letters passed along using Naviance, but that’s not to say you can’t use them! There are colleges in Naviance that are marked with “does not accept electronic submissions”, so there has to be a simple way of including or sending the additional recs to the school - whether you send them yourself, have the director send them. I think it is good advice to have your student ask their guidance counselor what the best way to add one or two really great theatre recs with her other letters.

The Common App is the same for all schools - but you’ll put the schools you want to send the app to under “my colleges” or something like that, then you can click on their supplements. This is important, because some college supplements make the kids do another essay, or answer more questions pertaining to that school. Some supplements are simple (my D’s supplement for Wesleyan was just a one pager with informational questions - name, address, etc.). So the Common App is not tailored, it is the supplements that could be really different for each school.