Waiving rights for recommendations?

[notdeadyet]

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I was hoping that any folks involved in the program side of things could give me some guidance on this.

For ERAS letters of rec, the cover form indicates that we can choose to waive our rights to see the letter or not waive our rights. In med school applications, most folks advised us to waive the rights.

Is this the case for residency applications? Do programs care? Does your average letter writer?

I'm not requesting letters from anyone who I'm not confident will write a good one, but I have more folks writing letters for me than I'll be sending in to each program, so being able to pick and choose which ones are best suited to individual residencies seems like it would be helpful.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'd ask this in general residency forum, but wasn't sure if Psych programs had their own take on it.

 

[animas]

Waive it. Period.

 

[whopper]

Waive it if you're confident the person will write a good letter. That I hope will be more more than 99% of you.

From my experience, even if a professor doesn't like you, they might not write a terrible letter, or be upfront and tell you they will not write the best of letters.

I've told people to not ask me to write them a LOR. While that may have been a bit confrontational, I'd rather be that than write a very critical one behind that person's back without some forwarning.

I do know of only 1 case where not waiving helped the person. The guy was a history major. He asked a professor for a LOR who quite prejudicially held that major against him. The prof wrote something to the effect of -Yes, his grades are impressive, yes he says he wants to be a doctor, but I can't see how this person can have an interest in medicine if he chose a history major.-

The above case was very very very outside the norm. I forgot the exact circumstances that lead to the applicant actually wanting to excercise his right to read the LOR, but I do recall that in the end, his reading of the application lead to a complaint to the dept, and the writer of the LOR was forced to write a letter of apology, and it was the difference between the person getting into medical school or not.

In short, the department told the professor it was unfair for him to believe someone should not be a doctor if that person was a history major, and if he believed so, he never addressed the issue with the applicant before he decided to condemn him in his letter, thus his letter was unfair.

 

[notdeadyet]

Fair enough. Will waive it. Thanks for the information...