Lets talk letters of recommendation

Times3
Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:48:24 +0000

The range of responses to this post drives home the point that you really need to scrutinize the specific directions from each school. Among the schools on my son’s current list, recommendations include: guidance counselor only; artistic teacher only; three teacher recs, one of which can be the guidance counselor; two artistic teachers only; NO artistic teachers but two academics; and more that I can’t remember right now.

As I’m sure most of us know by now, both the Common App and Naviance are owned by the same corporation, which also owns College Confidential. At our school–an independent school, where I teach and my son attends–we have to upload recommendations via Naviance for any Common App school. It has all changed so quickly and frequently over the last few years that I will not pretend to have complete or even accurate knowledge about the process and whether it’s universal or unique to our school. And as an arts teacher, I am usually either an extra (third) recommender or I write only for kids applying to visual arts programs. We do write additional recs for kids who are wait-listed, and my understanding is that these are submitted the old-fashioned way (snail mail) rather than via Naviance. I’ve also written numerous recs for former students who are transferring, and these are usually sent on letterhead in a sealed/signed envelope as Glassharmonica describes.

Despite having a reasonable amount of experience with this as a teacher, I’m in a dilemma about how to handle the second artistic rec for my own son. He’s had the same theater teacher since third grade! So he has to figure out not only whom to ask but also how to submit it. I’ll update on this thread when I find out from our college counselors how they want him to handle this. I know Hartt is one school that asks for two artistic recommendations. And as NJTheatreMom points out above, NYU-Tisch does not accept letters from arts teachers. (We’re used to this, but it still feels a bit like a slap in the face!). JMU asks kids to bring a recommendation to their audition but states explicitly that they will not read more than one. And I’m interested an issue implied by ActingDad’s questions in the original post: is it awkward to ask a faculty member from a summer pre-college program to write a generic recommendation for OTHER colleges? My son attended BUSTI and loved it, but it’s unclear to me whether he should ask any of his instructors there for a recommendation!

Finally, re: the Common App itself, my own experience (working with my advisees and older kids) is that the application is the same for all schools and only the supplements are different. Since my S3 is about to start the process, I guess I’ll find out first-hand if that has changed!

Does anyone else feel like you’re at the beginning of a very long and bumpy and terrifying roller coaster…?