Round up the Posse

[UndraftedFreeAgent]

I just found out that my final recommender never sent her letter to one of my top choice schools. The school sent me an email Friday saying that I needed to have it in by the 15th of January in order to be considered for full funding. What's more, the school's website says the funding deadline is the 1st of February. This is the same recommender who agreed in September to write these letters, yet missed a Dec. 3 deadline and barely made a number of mid-December deadlines. I pride myself on being a very patient person, but she has stolen my time and with it, my sunny disposition. My other two recommenders responded to requests within 24 hours. This last prof was my advisor and I'm told she wrote a phenomenal letter for me to attend the program from which I just received an MA. What can I really do, aside from just shake my fist in the direction of my undergrad and write polite emails?

[snowcapk]

Sorry to hear about the problems. You could call next Monday, in addition to your e-mails. Does she have a secretary? Sometimes it helps to contact them, since they have some control over the prof's schedule. :twisted: Finally, if you still know people at your undergrad, call out a big favor. E-mail them a letter to print out, put in an envelope, and leave in the professor's mailbox. Together, these bold moves should elicit a rapid response.

My other advice is to not assume that the professor is at fault, no matter how flaky she has been before. I can hardly count on my fingers and toes combined how many times adcomms and scholarship foundations have lost, misplaced, misfiled, returned, or incinerated things that I have personally placed in the mail. When you contact the prof, say that U of X "can't find" the letter and kindly ask her to "resubmit" it. Offer to pay for overnight mail and delivery confirmation so that she will not be "further inconvenienced." (Bonus: you know when she sent the letter and whether the adcomm is at fault.)

One more thing: if you can't reach her by phone on Monday, find out if she is in town at all. Contact other profs there is necessary: the department chair or his/her assistant can be expected to figure that out for you. If she won't be reachable, obviously you need to figure that out ASAP so you can move to plan B or leverage with the school for an extended deadline.

[Minnesotan]

Uck! I was in a similar situation with one of my referees. Said referee is the nicest person you could meet, very enthusiastic about my potential, and completely ignorant of the concept of time.

All I can advise is polite persistence. You don't want to burn bridges, but when someone agrees to do something, the least they can do is have it done within 3-4 months. But what can you do? You are completely at their mercy, and if you get pushy, who knows what the reference they eventually turn in might say?

Frustrating indeed!

[picklejar]

I also had this problem. I discovered the letters from one of my recommenders were missing...three days before deadline for four schools! Ugh.

One thing I discovered, which might be helpful to you, is that several of the schools were willing to accept an emailed draft of the letter from my recommender as long as the hard copy was in the mail.

[Minnesotan]

I ended up having to do just that for one school. They contacted me the day before my referee left for holiday break, saying the ref. still wasn't in, and that they wouldn't be back in the office until after the deadline had passed.

Needless to say, I was less than pleased until I got the issue solved. =)

[NO8DO]

Minnesotan, question about Minnesota

What is your current degree program?

Before I decided to go the Romance Language route before I go into a Medieval/History PhD, I was originally going to be applying to schools for history programs (also ones that came up are Toronto, Hopkins, UCSD, UKentucky, UGA, Princeton, few others). My advisor gave me a whole list of schools that have specialists in Medieval/Early Modern Spain (of which there aren't many in the US, and many are nearing retirement age), and Minnesota was one of them with William Phillips and Carla Rahn Phillips. Do you know of those two? Just curious because after I get my MA (I'm thinking that even if by some crazy miracle I get into Penn I probably wouldn't take it), I am still planning to eventually go back to my original discipline and get my PhD in some form of Medieval/Renaissance History, because in reality that's what I ultimately want to teach.

Anyway back to the topic you were discussing,

My last recommendation letter, ironically, was from my current advisor, and I had to, in a very subtle way, let her know what the deadlines were more than once because I was worried she wasn't going to get them in on time. Great and extremely intelligent lady, just obviously very busy!

[Minnesotan]

I don't go to The U anymore. I'm half a continent away from MN now. Moreover, I never met the professors in question, even though I did complete a history major as an undergrad.

As for the letters of recommendation, there's always one, isn't there? Everybody has one referee who makes them nervous, or outlasts a deadline, despite our best efforts to politely prod them into action.

If only grant money was based on the timeliness of one's recommendation-giving, the problem would be solved. Profs would be lined up to write fantastic letters for you. lol

[UndraftedFreeAgent]

One thing I discovered, which might be helpful to you, is that several of the schools were willing to accept an emailed draft of the letter from my recommender as long as the hard copy was in the mail.

I actually got the academic coordinator of the school in question to allow just that. My recommender is going to send both versions tomorrow. At this point, I would've been willing to get myself fired for skipping work to drive the materials to her myself and then escort the letter to its final destination in person.

I still have no answer about why their deadline is suddenly the 15th of January rather than the 1st of February. I guess it's just their prerogative to be arbitrary.

[Minnesotan]

You don't needto be intelligent to earn an advanced degree, only willing to jump through hoops and do monotonous work for years on end.

[rising_star]

Why the romance languages MA if you want to get back to history ultimately?

[NO8DO]

Well, a few reasons actually.

The first reason is that I don't want to go right back to school for the PhD (I want to get a couple years of working in, pay off some undergrad loans, etc.), and since I absolutely loved my undergraduate experience with Spanish and French, both at home and abroad, I really want to continue my study of the languages in grad school. Because I want to work for a little while, I figure I'll do some freelance translation work -for which I've already made some business contacts- possibly some adjunct teaching, and get more familiar with the languages on a professional level.

Now normally you'd think, right but how is that a precursor to a PhD in history? Well my main historical interest is Medieval/Early Modern Europe, and so the majority of the source material I will need to work with (from first hand experience) will be in French, Spanish, German and Italian (the latter two I have not studied, although Italian is made simple enough because of my experience with French and Spanish). But anyway I want to approach Medieval/Renaissance France and Spain with something of a literary angle, and so the two degrees would ultimately complement each other.

It is something of a round-about way to go about my studies but I've talked to a few professors who have made similar choices (for example MA in Art History, PhD in Medieval Studies/any combination of humanities with History/Medieval Studies) and in the end it really just makes them more marketable to universities also - I would be able to teach both history, and language courses whenever I do go into teaching (plus given the difficulty of getting a job right away in teaching the humanities, I feel like my plan could be pretty beneficial financially speaking). I made sure that the MA degrees to which I applied all offered some kind of funding, so that I won't be spending a million dollars on a decent MA program either.

[rising_star]

That makes sense then regarding the Spanish MA. I almost wish I'd gone that route so I could teach college-level Spanish courses. Alas, social sciences are my bread and butter apparently.

[NO8DO]

What field are you currently studying/teaching? (apologies if you've mentioned it I just don't recall if you had said anything other than the social sciences)

[alexandra_sophie]

My MA adviser, who is sooo sweet and so helpful 99.9% of the time, kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off until the very last moment (i.e. 2 weeks before it was due and literally a day before I went to Boston for a week right after Christmas). She's in the UK and I'm in the US and I was very patient and did everything that she told me to do but when she wasn't responding to me after I held-up my end of the bargain, I finally had to throw my hands up in the air in a state of panic and dread and had another recommender write-in for me from an internship (and she also happens to be a Philosophy Professor so that helped for a 2 for 1) :wink: . When my adviser finally wrote me back I told her very politely that I had someone else do it because I thought that she had forgotten or become bogged down with other things (as she had so many times indicated that she was "SOOOOO BUSY") and I apologised profusely because I was mortified and she was in a state of profound panic that she had missed a deadline (she had missed one and was about to miss another 2). It was a massive bust-up all-around and I felt really cheap asking another Professor/Superviser to write me a recommendation, but if I didn't, I would've dropped all my balls!

I appreciate the fact that professors have other students and other things going on in their lives, but with the advent of all of these things being on-line and being given 4-5 months notice, it seems a bit ridiculous that we're chasing them around in a state of total and absolute panic. (Or maybe that's just me...??!!) I had to write a recommendation for a student this semester and I got it done by the final exam and I *was* running around the department office the day of my student's final getting it into the envelope for her, so I'm not much better, but at least I got it together and it was really just a letter in support of an app for her to attend my alma mater.

Oi! Glad you got it worked-out though!!! That's good!