Hey guys,
I hope your applications are going smoothly! I submitted all of mine at the beginning of the month so that during the holidays I'd be able to relax- however, there is one thing standing in between me and complete tranquility: one letter of recommendation.
The guy who I asked to write my letter of recommendation is famous in nanoscience, and I aced a thermodynamics course I took with him. I talked to him fairly often whenever I took his course, so I thought he'd be a good candidate for a letter. However, the one fault of his is that he can be difficult to get a hold of. Despite this, I sent him an email in early November and asked if he'd be willing to write me a letter for graduate school, and he responded quickly saying that he would.
Needless to say, after about a month of waiting, I sent him a reminder email about my letters and didn't get a response. I sent him a couple more reminders over the next week and tried to find him at his office, but was unable to solicit a response from him. My first wave of applications was due December 15th, and on about December 11th I still hadn't heard from him. Out of frustration, I frantically contacted my undergraduate adviser and explained the situation. She said that if I still hadn't heard from him in the next couple days, she'd be willing to write me a letter in his place. I sent him one last email, asking him to respond so that I know whether or not I needed to ask for a different recommendation, and he responded to that one saying that they would be done that night. The following morning, he had submitted my recommendation for the NDSEG, but none of the graduate school recommendations. I emailed him again asking for his progress on the grad school recommendations, and he said they would be done the following day. I waited, and he missed the deadline for the December 15th schools. I've sent him a few more emails over the last several days trying to get a hold of him as well tried to call him, but I've failed to get a hold of him.
I know he's willing to help me (especially since he submitted the NDSEG recommendation), but I don't know how much more I can take of his sporadic responses, especially since there are deadlines past and deadlines approaching. Do you think it's time for me to give up on this professor and ask for the more reliable one to write my letter on such short notice? Anybody else in the same shoes as me? Sorry about the long post, but I didn't imagine that this would be this frustrating!