Interfolio online delivery

[asleepawake]

I posted some frustrations over in the LOR forum a few days ago, and I got no reply. I'm currently even more frustrated!

Who is using Interfolio? I naively thought that Interfolio would make my life easier for me and my LOR writers. It seems to be doing neither.

Every school that I am applying to wants letters submitted electronically. However, almost none of them acknowledge the existence of Interfolio at all. Submitting letters from Interfolio is supposed to be easy; I enter a special e-mail for the e-mail address, pay Interfolio, and they do everything else for me. Uh... if only. First of all, I currently only have one letter submitted to Interfolio and I am waiting on the other two. This means that I cannot submit the information on most online applications to test the system with the one letter that I do have, because it tells me the page is incomplete. I finally got through on one website, and Interfolio was supposed to e-mail me the next day. They didn't. It's been 3 days. Does this mean it didn't work? Does it not go through until I submit the entire application?

This is extremely frustrating because I want to be able to tell my LOR if and how many actual school websites they will have to submit to. Deadlines are looming and I still can't do this because I have no idea.

Anybody else using Interfolio? Is is just me or am I paying them to stress me out?

Edited November 21, 2012 by asleepawake

[Swagato]

Just call Interfolio and talk to them. They're extremely helpful and you can discuss any of your issues with them.

[asleepawake]

Thanks! I guess this is what I should do, it's just super hard to navigate all of these applications. It sure would be nice if schools just made it clear if they accept Interfolio.

[EmmaJava]

1-3 days for delivery?  Not for me. I used Interfolio like a maniac just earlier this week and while I was still in process of ordering one delivery, then a previous delivery would be made after a few minutes - I was literally watching my email as it happened and I'm thinking there was about 10 minutes between the "confirmation about having placed an order" and "delivery made" notifications. This as recently as...two nights ago, in which I made a dozen or so orders. I've had no problems with it at all, but I think I may see what could be a hang-up...asleepawake, you mention waiting on two other recs and not having a complete application to submit? I've only used Interfolio in order to submit recommenders' letters, and those have been doable in batches of 1, 2, or 3. In addition, I'm not using it for any other pieces, as I can upload things like WS and SoP myself (and prefer to). Finally, I would bet that if you're trying to have Interfolio upload to the online system that recommenders get emailed/invited to use, then that would slow the delivery and clog things up. I've just been having email deliveries go to the "graduate administrator," or the "graduate coordinator," or the "graduate officer," or whoever. Sometimes this is within an English/Lit department, sometimes it's with the Grad School, but in all cases I've found someone willing to accept and process the letters, which seems to mean that a human person somewhere is accepting these into a personal email account and doing the upload to the system on my behalf once the letters are received. Does this make sense? Are you trying to hit Dec. 15 deadlines?  You can totally do that, I'm not worried for you based on my experience, but I can see how you'll remain stressed until the process feels more straightforward to you. I hope this helps out.

I was pretty stressed waiting for a letter writer to get back to me just earlier this week, for what it's worth. This person had missed the early December deadlines and all of those programs have (to my knowledge) accepted the late submission (which I controlled on Interfolio), acknowledging that this was letter writer's fault and beyond my control. In fact I think I may have even scored some sympathy points as the on-the-ball applicant who had to deal with this. Or, at least I can tell myself that for a while, right? Anyway, point is, I think there is plenty of room (and time) for optimism. Good luck!