Principal Letter of Recommendation

[renaissancedad]

^ It seems to me that there are 3 options for getting a letter from your principal submitted:

1. Have your principal submit a letter as an official "supplemental" letter of recommendation. That's straightforward, and an accepted path. A supplemental letter from someone who knows you well and can add insight beyond that in your teacher recommendations has value. This does preclude you from having someone else write a supplemental letter, as schools generally frown on more than 1 supplemental letter; but that may not be an issue in your case. From your description, it sounds like your principal does know you well and in a capacity different from your teachers, and could add value.
2. Have your principal send an unsolicited letter. You cannot prevent anyone from sending an unsolicited letter, and schools will generally read what they receive. I had a teacher who knew me very well outside of the classroom send an unsolicited letter on my behalf (a long time ago), and I think it had a big impact on my acceptances.
3. It may be possible for your principal to write your school letter in place (or in cooperation with) your guidance counselor. I had never heard of this, but Allen Cheng mentioned it in his admissions blog, and claimed that it had a positive effect:

Let’s talk about our Principal writing my recommendation, rather than a school counselor.

This was definitely advantageous – remember how, way up top in Educational Data, the reader circled the “Principal.” Our Principal only wrote a handful of these recommendations each year, often for people who worked closely with him, like student body presidents. So it was pretty distinctive that I got a letter from our Principal, compared to other leading applicants from my school.

So how did my Principal come to write my recommendation and not those for hundreds of other students?

I don’t remember exactly how this came to be, to be honest. I didn’t strategize to have him write a letter for me years in advance. I didn’t even interact with him much at all until junior year, when I got on his radar because of my national rankings. Come senior year I might have talked to him about my difficulty in reaching counselors and asked that he write my recommendation. Since I was a top student he was probably happy to do this.

He was very supportive, but as you can tell from the letter to come, it was clear he didn’t know me that well.

Interestingly, the prompt for the recommendation has changed. It used to start with: “Please write whatever you think is important about this student.”

Now, it starts with: "Please provide comments that will help us differentiate this student from others.”

The purpose of the recommendation has shifted to the specific: colleges probably found that one counselor was serving hundreds of students, so the letters started getting mushy and indistinguishable from each other.

http://blog.prepscholar.com/successful-harvard-application-common-application-harvard-supplement#principalrec

These are all options to explore with your principal and GC. Especially if your GC doesn’t know you as well as the principal, he might be open to pooling resources.