- Joined
- May 8, 2012
- Messages
- 251
- Reaction score
- 179
Hello all,
After an fruitless application cycle, I want to find out if a poor LOR was the cause.
How would one go about determining if they had a poor letter of recommendation? Almost all schools from my experience do not give individual feedback of any kind to applicants (I can understand why -- the admissions people are busy enough as is). Regardless, I really don't want to get sunk next application cycle because I wasn't able to identify if I had a poor letter. I plan to add two new strong letters this time around, but I don't think strong letters can offset weaker ones.
Of my 5, I suspect that three of them should be fairly strong and two of them not as much (less connection to the writers, but I needed a non-science letter for one of them and I TA'd for the other and gave him a lot of supplementary material).
I emailed a few schools (schools that were ambiguous about if they gave feedback or not) asking if my application had any major discrepancies (or "red flags") I would need to address to improve my application. Three told me they don't give out any information, and one told me to contact them in May. I suppose I'll have to wait until May for that school. In the meantime, is there anything else I can do?
(I'm aware that other things could have gone wrong; but my secondary responses and PS are directly under my control and I plan to rework all of them anyway)
Thanks for the help.
After an fruitless application cycle, I want to find out if a poor LOR was the cause.
How would one go about determining if they had a poor letter of recommendation? Almost all schools from my experience do not give individual feedback of any kind to applicants (I can understand why -- the admissions people are busy enough as is). Regardless, I really don't want to get sunk next application cycle because I wasn't able to identify if I had a poor letter. I plan to add two new strong letters this time around, but I don't think strong letters can offset weaker ones.
Of my 5, I suspect that three of them should be fairly strong and two of them not as much (less connection to the writers, but I needed a non-science letter for one of them and I TA'd for the other and gave him a lot of supplementary material).
I emailed a few schools (schools that were ambiguous about if they gave feedback or not) asking if my application had any major discrepancies (or "red flags") I would need to address to improve my application. Three told me they don't give out any information, and one told me to contact them in May. I suppose I'll have to wait until May for that school. In the meantime, is there anything else I can do?
(I'm aware that other things could have gone wrong; but my secondary responses and PS are directly under my control and I plan to rework all of them anyway)
Thanks for the help.
