letters of recommendation

[basha]

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Hi. As many of you know that your pre-med committe has a limit on how many letters of recommendation that they send out - my schools limit is 3. Does anybody know if you can send additional recomm. to med schools on your own. My premed advisors strongly discourage this. But I think sending in more recomm. can help my application. For instance, for some DO schools i applied to, I've a DO letter of recomm. For another MD school around me I have a letter from a research faculty, which I want only to go to that specific school. What do you guys think I should do?

 

[UCLA2000]

Do they write committee letters? ...or are you talking about 3 individual letters of recommendation?

If it's the former than don't worry about it. However if they mean 3 individual letters each from a different professor that you've had.... then you've got a problem.

No you cannot send out letters on your own. I suggest that you look into alternative letters of rec services. Sometimes several offices on campus offer that service, and you can use multiple offices.

 

[vyc]

you can send additional letters of recommendations on your own. if the admissions committee didn't limit it at 3, i'd suggest sending more.

 

[nebula7]

if you know other people willing to write you good letters (in addition to the ones your committee is sending), I don't think there would be any problem with a few extra. The worse the med schools could do is just disregard the extra letters. This year I got a couple of letters from profs/MDs sent out in addition to the pre-med letter, even though the schools don't require that many. Just make sure the people writing them for you send them out, as the schools won't want letters coming directly from you.

 

[sandflea]

sure, you can send additional rec letters to most med schools, although some specifically place a limit on how many you send, so be mindful of this. the important thing is that you send letters that match the specifications that a med school requests (i.e. a DO letter, two science letters, etc), so if this means you need to send additional letters beyond the three your college will send, then so be it. what i did was to supply my additional recommenders with stamped, addressed envelopes for all the schools i was applying to, so they sent the letters without the help of my school's rec letter service, plus i never saw the letter (which is recommended). all in all, i sent most schools 7 rec letters.

 

[basha]

UCLA 2000 - my school does the committee letter thing. How does that change anything. I still have to have 3 letter of recomms, and no more than that. And my advisors still feel that adcoms look suspiciously on applicants that have extra recomm.'s not coming with the committee letter and rather seperately.

Did anyone have any problems with sending recomm. on your own after sending recomm. in with the committee letter.

 

[UCLA2000]

As I understand it a committee letter is a compilation of many individual letters of rec. It's different than having an author write a letter. My school didn't do it, so I don't know anything about how it works. sorry.