Getting LOR from home country while living overseas

[LunarSilverStar]

Hello,

As the title suggests, I currently live overseas and will begin applying for graduate school next month. However, I have a predicament. My main problem is that I have been out of college for about a year and 4 months and I am unsure how to approach a former mentor living in my home country about graduate school. I would love to just schedule a time to meet however living more than 6000 miles away is a problem. Therefore, I would like some advice on how to ask for LOR after not seeing said mentor for close to a year and half.

Also, is it normal for professors to send LORs to graduate schools overseas through snail mail? One of my programs don't do online applications so my recommenders will have to send actual letters. So another question is does the recommender pay for postage or should the person asking for the LOR pay for postage. Thanks for reading

LunarSilverStar

[kaister]

I'm curious to this as well as one of my letter writers is overseas. I'm at a loss how to provide him a pre-paid envelope since it can't just be one stamp...or can I just include 2-3 stamps and that should be good enough? Can I ask them if they'd like to scan/upload their letters (which is an option) instead of snail mail?

[rkg2012]

To talk to your old mentor, try to email and set up a skype appointment or pay for skype calling credit to phone him. It's a lot cheaper than travel. Perhaps ask to talk about your career plans and then bring up the letter in your actual conversation.

I applied from overseas, but thankfully all of my letters were electronic. Perhaps you could ask the university if the professor could email them directly.

I would worry about pre-paid envelopes overseas, since you REALLY don't want the letter to get lost. Two out of five hard copies of my transcripts got lost in the mail (or simply not processed correctly by the university)... and I sent them by an upgraded, but not perfectly trackable method. Usually overseas mail is much more than just a few stamps worth.

[TakeruK]

I am not sure how you would send a prepaid envelope to an advisor in a different country since you would need to be using the postage stamps for that country, not the one you're currently in! I don't think it's usually easy to buy postage stamps for a foreign country. In addition, if I was going to ask for a snail mailed reference letter, I would always always pay for what's called "Registered mail" in Canada so that it comes with a delivery guarantee and tracking information (it's ~$10 instead of the usual ~$0.60 for a letter). I have had a bad experience with mail getting lost before!!

I've only had to use snail mail letters for fellowships administered at the local level, and when I asked for these letters (from the same country but far away), I did offer to send prepaid envelopes. However, the profs usually have their own mail accounts, paid for by the grants or other research funds, and the department admin staff takes care of making sure mail is sent with the right priority and tracking so I didn't have to worry about it. The way we see it -- writing letters is part of the cost of hiring a student to do work, so the money for mailing letters can come from the same source as the money that was used to pay me. Of course, you should probably discuss this first! I'd offer to pay for it by having the prof's department send me an invoice for whatever mailing costs are incurred. Hopefully, it's only 1 or 2 schools that are still stuck in the 20th century and asking for snail mailed letters!