Submitting letters of rec yourself

[columbia09]

Hi all I haven’t been on this forum in a year and I’m about to head into the military soon to get my commission as an Air Force Lt, can you say post 9/11 GI Bill ?!? So I don’t know when I’ll be applying to grad school or what type of degree I even want now. I’ve applied two times in the past to geoscience programs because that was my real passion but with no luck unfortunately of getting into a program that I really wanted to attend. Mostly because of my low GRE scores and by finding out one of my letters of Rec was terrible. I’m currently in a career field I’m trying to get out of and hopefully the military will help with that. So my question is can i submit my LORs myself to programs or do the writers have to submit them themselves? I have three currently in my possession, two from professors and one from my current supervisor. One of my professors doesn’t even work at the university that I went to so I have no way to contact him and I don’t know when I’ll be applying back to school. Depends on what my situation will be 

[columbia09]

Bump 

[fuzzylogician]

Self-submitted letters come with several grains of salt as far as admissions committees are concerned. It's harder to be able to trust that the letter is authentic and that it was written with full intellectual freedom (as in the case of a letter that the student never sees). It just looks very suspicious when a student writes and/or submits their own letter. It is MUCH better if you can get your LOR writers to submit their own letters. One remedy for cases when it's hard to stay in touch with older writers is to use a service like Interfolio or similar, where they only need to upload the letter once, and then you can get the service to submit the letter anywhere that's needed after that. The advantage is in maintaining confidentiality, so the writer uploads the letter to the service and the service sends the letters to where needed, and the candidate isn't involved in the process any more than they would be if the writer emailed the letter directly. 

As for your prof who's changed jobs, most academics don't just fall off the face of the earth even if they do switch jobs and even if they're old and don't do a great job maintaining an online presence. Contact your old program; they should have contact info for this person, if you can't find it by just googling. 

[columbia09]

1 hour ago, fuzzylogician said:

Self-submitted letters come with several grains of salt as far as admissions committees are concerned. It's harder to be able to trust that the letter is authentic and that it was written with full intellectual freedom (as in the case of a letter that the student never sees). It just looks very suspicious when a student writes and/or submits their own letter. It is MUCH better if you can get your LOR writers to submit their own letters. One remedy for cases when it's hard to stay in touch with older writers is to use a service like Interfolio or similar, where they only need to upload the letter once, and then you can get the service to submit the letter anywhere that's needed after that. The advantage is in maintaining confidentiality, so the writer uploads the letter to the service and the service sends the letters to where needed, and the candidate isn't involved in the process any more than they would be if the writer emailed the letter directly. 

As for your prof who's changed jobs, most academics don't just fall off the face of the earth even if they do switch jobs and even if they're old and don't do a great job maintaining an online presence. Contact your old program; they should have contact info for this person, if you can't find it by just googling. 

I actually know a lot of people that wrote their own letters and they just let their professors sign off on it which I think is unfair

Edited December 2, 2017 by columbia09

[fuzzylogician]

12 minutes ago, columbia09 said:

I actually know a lot of people that wrote their own letters and they just let their professors sign off on it which I think is unfair

Unfair, and also not totally relevant to your question, as far as I can tell. (Mostly not just unfair, but probably harmful, since students won't know the genre as well as their professors and probably won't do as good a job of writing the letter.)