I'm scared of secondaries + LOR question

[badasshairday]

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I can't believe this long process is starting now!

For secondary apps, you need to send in your LOR's right? To each individual school? I am still waiting on one LOR that I want, can I send in the other 3 and send in this 4th one when I get it?

 

[scrubsrfun]

I don't know if you have a pre-health office at your school that handles letters for you, but at my school, Rutgers, the HPO (health professions office) sends out our letters via virtualevals. According to my HPO, once they send your packet to schools, that's it, they can't upload anything so I think you should wait until all your letters are in if it's one that can really help you. Good luck! 🙂

 

[146233]

I can't believe this long process is starting now!

Get used to it; it's a marathon, not a sprint! 🙂

For secondary apps, you need to send in your LOR's right? To each individual school? I am still waiting on one LOR that I want, can I send in the other 3 and send in this 4th one when I get it?

Yes. Each secondary will include instructions detailing how that school wants you to handle LORs. Even schools with no secondary (UMDNJ-RWJMS, for example) e-mail instructions. My HPO will either send LORs via regular snail mail (so you can send the three now and wait for the fourth), or VirtualEvals (all letters need to come at once). We are still so darn early in this process, you can afford to wait for your fourth letter to come in.


Best,
-z

 

[ryandote]

Here's a little different take than the other two. My school (BYU) would only send a certain amount of letters through VirtualEval for us (I can't remember if it was 3 or 4). They had an extremely early deadline, something like March, and then told us we could request to have them forwarded to the schools on the first day of AMCAS transmission. I did all of this.


However, I was applying the the University of Utah with the most ridiculously stringent requirements you can imagine. They REQUIRE 6 letters. Therefore, I had to get 2 more letters done all on my own. I ended up forwarding them along to Utah and some of my other schools later in the summer.

As soon as you have met the letter requirement (often 2-3 letters) the school will consider your application complete. You can send them piecemeal as they come in, but you won't be complete until after they have all the required ones anyway.

 

[Hershi]

I don't know if you have a pre-health office at your school that handles letters for you, but at my school, Rutgers, the HPO (health professions office) sends out our letters via virtualevals. According to my HPO, once they send your packet to schools, that's it, they can't upload anything so I think you should wait until all your letters are in if it's one that can really help you. Good luck! 🙂

i'm a Rutgers student as well. I did not know they did this though. hmm

 

[powerful_squib]

I don't know if you have a pre-health office at your school that handles letters for you, but at my school, Rutgers, the HPO (health professions office) sends out our letters via virtualevals. According to my HPO, once they send your packet to schools, that's it, they can't upload anything so I think you should wait until all your letters are in if it's one that can really help you. Good luck! 🙂

I go to RU tooo.... Yayies!

 

[nick_carraway]

I'm starting to worry about my committee letter. I have the paperwork requirements to interview with them but I don't have a nice suit yet. They say I need to be dressed like I will be at real interviews. The committee letter will take 3 weeks to compose and I won't meet with them until ~July 21 so what do I do about secondaries?

Everyone says to have a turnaround time of 24-48 hours for the secondaries but if my committee letter's not ready, even if I send in my secondaries, will schools review my app without having received my LORs?

 

[Bluesmurf314]

Same situation, I just got some secondaries and really want to get moving on them but my LOR's are not in yet (I only have 2 right now). One's in the mail from Korea and I don't know about the other two. There's one recommender that I was thinking would probably have it in by now, but she doesn't. Is there a nice way to ask what's going on with it?

 

[Abilene85]

Don't be afraid to be pushy in a nice way with your recommenders. Give them plenty of time to write you a good letter, but after that time, just kindly stay on top of it. Gentle reminders if they don't get it in.

At one school, I filled out a secondary, INTERVIEWED, and still 2 weeks after my interview one of my LORs was not in yet. It took me several e-mails, phone calls, and personal visits to finally get the letter in. I ended up in her office with an addressed envelope that she stuffed and sealed and gave back to me to mail myself. The professor wrote me a really nice one, but I guess fell into the "nutty professor" stereotype and was off in a world all her own.

 

[mvenus929]

Wait a couple more weeks... it won't kill you to send in your LORs a week after you send in your secondary, and they're less likely to get lost if you keep them all together.

 

[chespirido]

Im sending in my secondaries as i get them, my letters will be ready to send within a couple of weeks. I dont think secondaries should wait if they dont have to, my reasoning is that the schools will sit on my app till they get my letters and then they'll jump right on it.