harbindreams

How much can three mediocre letters hurt an application? I wish I had gone out of my way to get more one on one time with my professors. Unfortunately, I didn't... It's not that I am a bad student. I have the highest GPA in my masters program and my professors seem to have a generally positive impression of me. The only problem is I that I am not particularly close to any of them! I'm not sure how I let this happen given that one of my goals when I started this program was to make sure that I would get awesome recommendation letters in case I decided to continue with graduate school later. I did find some professors who are supportive and said they would be happy to write letters for me. I had long discussions with each of them about my goals, research interests, and general background, and they have copies of my SOP, resume, GRE scores, and transcripts. Still, the extent of their experience with me is that I took their class, got a good grade, maybe wrote a good term paper, and I can only worry about what kind of letters they would write! Would three letters like this doom my chances of getting into a decent program anywhere? Edit: could it be a good idea to swap one of these letters for a good professional reference?

I'm up for it! I have a Sociology PhD SOP that needs some revising...

PM me if anyone is interested. I can review your SOP in return! High graduate gpa/high GRE scores, need to explain away low undergrad gpa...

Hello everybody, My stats: Finance major, 3.05 cumulative GPA with a strong downward trend after six unfocused years at a big state university. In the beginning, I had several semesters of 4.0 grades, and then things started to go downhill, lots of Ws etc. There are many reasons why this happened, including immaturity, lack of focus, working several jobs, and a very serious motorcycle accident. GRE scores: I have a 790 quantitative, 710 verbal, 4.0 writing. I am wondering if there has been anyone here in this kind of situation who has been able to get funding from a school, even a very low ranked school?