Handling Reference Letters

[History98]

Hello to All,

 

I have noticed that universities often ask you put in the e-mails of your referees then each University then contacts your recommenders.This can cause problems when you are applying to many different universities as your referees will be receiving e-mails from different universities and then respond to each.How are people getting around this issue? Are there intermediaries that can be used to give references to the universities? (i.e each recommender sends his recommendation to a central place / website / service then the universities can then email the intermediary to get your references).

 

Thank You, any input is always appreciated. 

[TakeruK]

For STEM fields, this is normal. Yes, the referees will get a ton of emails from different places and have to find each email to click on the special link and upload the letter. Many students help reduce the work for professors by doing these things:

 

1. Send your profs a list of all the schools you're applying to, the profs you want to work with, and the deadline.

2. Send all of these emails at the same time. The email is not sent until you type in their email address. What I would do is start all my applications and get them all to the point where it asks for LORs (usually you can skip right to this step). Then send the requests for the first school, then log out, log into the next school, etc and repeat. This helps your LOR writers because all the emails relating to your application will be in the same area of their inbox.

3. Finally, these applications usually allows you to send reminder emails. What I did was offered to resend such an email upon request since my prof would say "Okay, I have time tomorrow to write your LOR, please resend the reminder so that the link appears near the top of my inbox".

 

For other fields, there are central repositories like Interfolio. But that only works if your schools accept letters from these repositories too.

[ginagirl]

I agree with everything Takeruk said. I did mostly the same except I filled out the LOR section of the applications in chunks (ie 5 one day, and then a week or two later 5 more). This was nice in case they were staying on top of things, they didn't have to do all of them at one time, and it was also helpful since it served as a reminder if they didn't yet do the previous chunk. Every time I input their emails into the apps to send the notification, I also sent them a personal email summarizing the ones I had just submitted, and reminded them of the deadlines.

[TakeruK]

ginagirl is right -- chunks is better than "all" at once, and it was what I really meant! I had deadlines that are around Dec 1, Dec 15 and Jan 1, so I submitted the requests in these 3 chunks.

[History98]

I think I will take your advice and send out e-mails in chunks, thanks to everyone for their input.