It appears that one of my recommenders is flaking out on me

[Ideal Impulse]

She's a non academic type person. She verbally agreed to write letters for me when I asked her about six weeks ago, but then expressed some hesitation once I put it into e-mail. I changed around my application process to make things easier for her, and explained exactly what her responsibilities were, but I haven't heard back from her in about two weeks. My other recommenders are two professors, both of whom I think can write excellent letters.

With the deadlines coming up so quickly, I feel like I need to make a decision ASAP about who my third recommender should be (and none of the options are that great--would two awesome letters cancel out a fairly boring, average one?). Any advice on how to deal with someone who might be getting cold feet?

[fuzzylogician]

From everything I've read on this board and on others, two strong letters and a fairly boring third letter are good enough. If you're applying to a non-professional program, a letter from a professor usually carries more weight than a letter from a non-academic person so the meh-ness of the letter may be canceled out by its better source.

I was in a fairly similar situation when I applied two years ago (except that in my case the flaky recommender was my MA advisor!) and what I did was immediately approach a 4th professor. I didn't even bother asking schools if it was OK to submit a 4th letter because I felt like I didn't have a choice. In all of my applications, it was impossible to delete a recommender once I had enter her details, and besides in my case it'd look bad to delete my advisor. So I simply added a 4th recommender to online apps that allowed it, and had him send paper letters to the rest of the schools. In the end my advisor came through (at the VERY LAST MINUTE) and I ended up with 4 letters. No one seemed to mind. Bottom line: cover your bases. Better have too many letters than too few, otherwise your app may be considered incomplete and not get reviewed.

[eklavya]

She could be really busy with her own work, or might have been working on your LoRs.. it's hard to tell. I would at least expect some kind of communication from her regarding the yay/nay or at what step the LoR writing has come to. Since these aren't happening, and as you mentioned that she seemed little hesitant, which is not a good sign at all, it's probably the right time to talk to your backup LoR writer. She might come through in the last minute, because of her guilty conscience pushing her to act humane. But it's not worth going through the mental agony and taking the risk in case she does not get the letters in. As someone said above, it certainly won't hurt to have more letters, but it definitely will to have less. Therefore, act on it asap.