med speechie hopeful

Hi Med Speechie! I would advise that you take it in mid-October and do a crash course with Magoosh! Magoosh offers this deal I've seen that offers a refund if you don't improve 5 points from your first test, so it's a good guarantee and gives you a month to study with enough time to send in your results. Time is really of the essence with these applications, and you want them in and done as soon as possible. Your application being at the top of the pile could really help your chances versus being towards the end. 

Thank you so much for this advice!

This was exactly what I wanted to know.  Thanks so much!

How I handled my letter of intent I did a general outline of what I wanted to say and then tailored it individually to each school depending on what they wanted. I said my interest in speech, a background about me and my goals for grad school and what I liked about the grad program. My professors did a general letter of recommendation for each school. CSDCAS is nice because they can just submitt that once. Hope that helps! I know applying to school is stressful!

For the CSDCAS letters each professor I had submitted one letter. So I had 4 people write my letters of recommendation and on CSDCAS I think I applied to 25 schools but they didn't submit it 25 times, just once! For schools not on csdcas I gave my professors a list of those schools and a due date I wanted them to upload the letter by. Most of these applications they could upload electronically and were sent an email explaining the process. I hope that helps!

As AlwaysaFalcon mentioned, each of your references submit one letter of rec on CSDCAS. All your schools will use that one submission. Personal statements or Letter of Intents are submit separately for each college on CSDCAS. I, too, also made a general one that targets the obvious questions (Why you chose this field? Why that particular school, etc.) then later tailored it to that specific school.
A HUGE Tip: Try to submit your stuff at least 3-4 weeks in advanced (including your LOR). It takes FOREVER for CSDCAS to receive it, review it and post it in your file as "completed".  Some schools will specifically say it on their site that if CSDCAS did not completed it by the due date, it's considered as an incomplete application. Every school is different, call CSDCAS to see which one of your schools need everything "completed" by the due date and which schools are ok that CSDCAS received documents but have not put "completed" in your file yet. The earlier you start on your submissions, the better. Don't wait till peak time (Dec-Feb) because my GRE scores took 3.5 weeks to be posted in my CSDCAS application. Even the process of paying it needed time to approve. It was such a hassle!