Mistake in LOR

[DE12MD]

Advertisement - Members don't see this ad

I just had my first interview and we were discussing my family when the interviewer asked, "but wait, don't you have a sibling who is ill?" And I said, "no" and he looked through my file and read a line of a letter that stated "And she takes care of her twin sister who is sick" and I was like "that's not me. I only have brothers." And then the interviewer told me who wrote the letter and I said, "well, he mentioned to me at the time that he was writing several other letters, so he must have made a mistake." We finished the interview, which, with the exception of the letter incident, went pretty well.
Of course after the interview I flipped out, called the health professions committee and was like, "how was I supposed to spot this when I waived my rights to see my letters?" They were the ones who read my letters. And they basically said my only options are to: 1. have my professor write a new letter and have the committee send it to all my schools. This is basically not an option as my next interview is Monday and the time that it would take to have this done is just not reasonable. 2. wait for it to come up in all of my interviews and explain that a mistake was made by my professor who was confused as he was writing several letters at the time.
My question is mainly - - how foolish does this make me look? I have 7 letters of recommendation that are actually good and were written by people who knew me well. Does this mistake make me look as if I just asked random professors for letters?
I am really concerned, so if anyone has any feedback for me, I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[polycon7]

Hey sorry to hear that! Thats aweful and it isnt your fault at all. Does your school participate in any of those online recommendation services like virtualeval or interfolio? It would be quick to get a letter on there and just send it out to all the schools you applied to.

 

[nekrogg]

yikes. that must have been terrible. i hope the interviewer is understanding because it could have been an honest mistake (on the letter writer's part)


worst case scenario: the interviewer thinks you are lieing. but this is not very plausible because you did not try to propogate the lie in anyway.


My letter writer also made a mistake, which i found out about after he sent the letters.. he said i did research for my school. but i did research for a private institution out of school.


If the interviewer thinks the same way I do, he probably brushed it off as a misunderstanding and it would have made a difference in your application.

 

[45408]

I wouldn't bother telling all the schools unless it comes up again in an interview - too much hassle, too little payoff. However, you probably did list all your siblings on AMCAS, so maybe you should. If you decide to update the schools, I'd recommend sending a letter saying something fairly vague, like "the committee had a misunderstanding and inadvertently included an incorrect factoid.....sorry for the confusion!"

 

[Haemulon]

Thats a real bummer, but I do not think that it reflects on you poorly at all. This is just a mix-up on the part of your recommender. Since you have seven letters, it sounds like it would not matter if this one was discarded anyway. Not a big problem. You handled it exactly right. For all you know it could have been a test of your character to see if you would have gone along with the lie for a smooth interview.

I think I may have a different LOR problem: when checking the online status at one of my schools, I noticed that one of my recommenders had his affiliation reported as being with another specific medical school, rather than as the college from which he was writing. I am wondering if he included the waiver coversheet for that other medical school into the wrong medical school's envelope. Or worse, what if he copied my waiver forms (for the two schools that I needed forms for) and included them in all of the envelopes. Doh!!!😱