Venting....

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dbuck64

dbuck64
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Venting....please forgive me

I have all of my applications in....

I have 80% of my secondaries completed and mailed in....

I am still waiting for two of my recommendations to be completed!!! I asked 2 MONTHS AGO!

Anyone joining me in massive amounts of frustration...I never thought that after this long process of applying to medical school, that this would be the most annoying part of it.

Suggestions?

I think its time for a long meditation run, bike, and swim.....

Thanks for listening

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dbuck64 said:
Venting....please forgive me

I have all of my applications in....

I have 80% of my secondaries completed and mailed in....

I am still waiting for two of my recommendations to be completed!!! I asked 2 MONTHS AGO!

Anyone joining me in massive amounts of frustration...I never thought that after this long process of applying to medical school, that this would be the most annoying part of it.

Suggestions?

I think its time for a long meditation run, bike, and swim.....

Thanks for listening

I'm with you too...I applied through the pre-med committee at my university, and all my letters were in by the end of APRIL. However, the professor making the committee letter hasn't een made mine, and its AUGUST. Even after he turns it in, the committee packet has to be edited and then sent out.

So I've been delayed on the order of months :(
 
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I hear you, oh, how I hear you.

If I had known what this was going to be like, I would have requested my LOR's in January. Of 2004. :mad:

Progress is being made, however. I finally heard from one of my writers that the letter was mailed to Interfolio today. So I've got 3 of 5 in the bag.

One of the remaining ones I knew right away was going to be late... he was very upfront about it so I can't be annoyed. The other one, however... grrrrrrrrrrrr.

It has been a saga. One of my writers left the country for the summer without sending in my letter. One of my writers disappeared suddenly from the university website, so apparently he no longer works there (and this is a tenured professor). My own boss needed four reminder emails, each increasingly agitated.

The day my last LOR comes in I am going to party even harder than I did after the MCAT.

[/rant]

Thanks for listening!
 
dbuck64 said:
Venting....please forgive me

I have all of my applications in....

I have 80% of my secondaries completed and mailed in....

I am still waiting for two of my recommendations to be completed!!! I asked 2 MONTHS AGO!

Anyone joining me in massive amounts of frustration...I never thought that after this long process of applying to medical school, that this would be the most annoying part of it.

Suggestions?

I think its time for a long meditation run, bike, and swim.....

Thanks for listening


Sometimes I just don't understand. Don't they realize that this is a rolling admission (for most schools)? What exactly makes writing a letter so hard if I asked you a long time ago? It is not that I am the first student that you would have to write the letter...

It is so frustrating especially there is nothing you can do.
 
You know, the funny thing about LORs is my chemistry professor is sending them out within 3 days of my asking. My pre-med advisor has yet to send a single letter out. SO my applications (which I'm getting done within two days of receipt) are just sitting waiting for my pre-med advisor.

Go figure.. the chem guy is more responsive and knows the value of getting stuff in EARLY more than the premed guy.
 
You guys don't know how relieving it is so hear all that. I thought I was all alone! It was SOOO pointless for me to submit everything early because one of my letters is still being waited on. I'm going nuts trying to get a hold of him! He has just diasppeared off the surface of this earth! I've emailed him, his secretary, this lady who works outside his office so see if he's even still alive!! And NOPE! Not one response! All my files are complete, except for that ONE darn letter! It's just so frustrating trying to figure out what I'm going to do!! It's like, there goes my early application!!
ANd what bothers me the MOST is that he's the one who offered to write the letter when he found out that I was applying to med school!!! When he offered, i figured, "oh, he's so enthusiastic about this whole process...I should have him write the letter"...yeah. BIG FREAKING MISTAKE! Don't they understand it's hard enough as is! I hate this whole process and I'm getting so discouraged right now...I think I might end up having to ask someone to quickly write me a letter or something. UGH this sucks :(
 
guess what?? my committee letter is DONE but my school is so damn disorganized that they haven't sent it yet...even though i've requested them to send it to 10 schools like 2 wks ago...just give me the letter and i'll do it myself.... :mad:
 
I had a somewhat absent-minded prof as my research supervisor one summer, and he ended up liking me so I figured I could get a good LOR from him. I asked him at the beginning of April to write one and sent him all the info. I knew there was a chance he might forget, so as a reminder, I sent him an email a few weeks later thanking him for his time and asking if there was anything else I could do. I was in Europe for two months this summer and figured everything would be set by the time I got back. Not so. My pre-health dept. still didn't have his letter. Turns out he not only forgot to write it, but also lost my waiver form, resume, personal statement, and everything else I'd sent. Now I gotta send it all to him again. He said he would write it very quickly, but I'm wondering how that is going to affect the quality of the letter. UGH!
 
I'm still waiting on 2 profs. I intend on leaving them weekly emails with follow up phone calls/voice messages.

Keep being curtious even if you sound like a broken record each week. If this fails in the next week, I'll go see them in person and/or write the letter for them and have them give the nod and send it on their letterhead. I think this may be necessary with one of the profs.
 
I have a similar problem. All my letters are in, but I'm now waiting on my advisor to write the cover letter for the packet, which probably won't be done for at least 2 weeks. It sucks because there's really nothing I can do about it. Pestering her won't do a thing since she's got so many of them to write. Guess I just have to wait it out, and pray that she gets the thing done soon.
 
werrrd. i logged in to make this exact post!! what bothers me isn't so much that the pre-med advisor/committee hasn't written the letter yet- it's that they kept telling us over and over to get everything in early, that you have to apply early or you'll never be a doctor, blah blah. they made us get our recommendations and essays with a strict deadline in MARCH. at that time, i thought, yeah this is a huge pain but it ensures an early application. it just sucks that every other part of the application process is something we can control- it's up to us to study hard and get grades, to do well on the mcat, to write the essays, get the secondaries in, etc. we can do a great job or a crappy job, but we have to take responsibility. this, however, is completely out of our hands, and it's so frustrating when you know you have a applications floating out there in application purgatory for over a month and no one will look at it because of the one thing you can't control!
 
No offense, but I'm starting to appreciate that my school is too cheap to have a premed committee or more than one advisor for a zillion premeds. but profs that don't take care of their essays is a major pain. try staking out their office, or where they get their coffee, etc and then u can "accidentally" run into them, strike up a conversation, and nicely corner them. as for the prof that disappeared from the website, try googling him/her.
 
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One of my MCAT insructors gave me some great advice on how to get the ball rolling. He said that a few weeks after you've requested the letter, send over a thank you note and/or drop off some sort of gift (ie bottle of wine, fruit basket, box of chocolates, whatever) to show how much you appreciate the person for taking their time out to write the letter. Trust me, if it's collecting dust on their desk somewhere, their guilt is going to push them to go find it. It works! :D
 
There's always a trade-off when hassling profs for recs. You don't want them to do a rush job and write you a crappy one. However, profs will usualy be upfront and write them quickly if they know it's important. If your prof is taking his sweet time, I'd suggest asking someone else. It may be an indication that it's on the bottom of his priorities.
 
TheMightyAngus said:
There's always a trade-off when hassling profs for recs. You don't want them to do a rush job and write you a crappy one. However, profs will usualy be upfront and write them quickly if they know it's important. If your prof is taking his sweet time, I'd suggest asking someone else. It may be an indication that it's on the bottom of his priorities.



Thank you everybody! That really helped - to know that others are in 'application purgatory'

This still is unbelievable --> these professors had to have been in the same position at one point in their lives --> 'Professionally Discourteous' is how I like to describe it

I do make this promise here and now --> if I am ever in the position to write a recommendation I will either accept it and complete it promptly OR kindly refuse and go about my business!!!


Dbuck
 
Helicon2 said:
I have a similar problem. All my letters are in, but I'm now waiting on my advisor to write the cover letter for the packet, which probably won't be done for at least 2 weeks. It sucks because there's really nothing I can do about it. Pestering her won't do a thing since she's got so many of them to write. Guess I just have to wait it out, and pray that she gets the thing done soon.


i'm in the same boat. am worried sick because i'm an underdog in this process, and it's REALLY important for adcoms to see my app in the first wave. good luck to everybody here.

makes you wonder why you got everything done early, only to wait it out for the rest of the pack to catch up.
 
dbuck64 said:
Thank you everybody! That really helped - to know that others are in 'application purgatory'

This still is unbelievable --> these professors had to have been in the same position at one point in their lives --> 'Professionally Discourteous' is how I like to describe it

I do make this promise here and now --> if I am ever in the position to write a recommendation I will either accept it and complete it promptly OR kindly refuse and go about my business!!!


Dbuck

Yeah, every year I will allot myself 10 letters to write, and no more. I'll do them promptly, and then that's it.
 
I'm in the same boat, and Northwestern's LOR's are due today for me...I asked in May. One of them sent it through campus mail instead of walking the 5min. Hopefully it gets to the committee today so they can fax it and then send it overnight :scared: :scared: :scared:
 
my premed advisors lost 3 of my 5 letters, I have confirmation that they've all been sent by the writers.. now they're sending a second time. one prof finally walked it over and put it in their hands so they can't say they dont have it, if only the last 2 would do that..

if I'd known it was such a nightmare I would have requested LORs waaaay earlier and used interfolio instead! grr!
 
yeah, the premed committee thing is kind of annoying... my school makes us get our LORs from professors in by March , but they don't send everyone's letter packets out to schools until mid- August . the committee letter gets done at their leisure sometime by then (apparently ie the very last minute... mine still isnt in yet :mad: )
 
angietron3000 said:
if I'd known it was such a nightmare I would have requested LORs waaaay earlier and used interfolio instead! grr!

SAME HERE! If I knew of Interfolio before I began this nightmarish process, I'd be a much happier person right now, instead of having to contact the schools and change the names of the ppl they should expect letters from since one of my writers totally bailed out on me, after I thought he had sent all 10 letters to the schools and stuff... :mad: im about to start crying anytime now...
 
watch, i bet next year committees will go paperless. they'll scan your letters and just forward the .jpgs all over the place.

this snail mail is just plain senseless.
 
truckibear said:
One of my MCAT insructors gave me some great advice on how to get the ball rolling. He said that a few weeks after you've requested the letter, send over a thank you note and/or drop off some sort of gift (ie bottle of wine, fruit basket, box of chocolates, whatever) to show how much you appreciate the person for taking their time out to write the letter. Trust me, if it's collecting dust on their desk somewhere, their guilt is going to push them to go find it. It works! :D

Definitely - I've heard this too and would try it out if you've been waiting for awhile. The guilt would get ME moving if I were a professor!
 
ok, so my undergrad letter service has finally received 4 out of 5 letters: one science, one non-science, and two supervisors/PIs. I noticed that some of the schools only require one science letter.. think I should go ahead and send letters to those schools to complete my file? or wait another week or two til the 2nd science letter arrives??
 
AARRRRGGHHH i know why my rec letters haven't gone out yet!!! my committee head is OUT OF TOWN. who goes out of town in the middle of the application cycle????

i think i'm going to explode.
 
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