My MD already knows that I will be applying to bschools this year, but I am wondering whether it is too burdensome to ask him for a letter of reference for 5 different schools. Do all schools give the person providing the recommendation free reign such that he could just replace the school name for each letter and be done with it, or will they ask customized questions that will make my request a bigger pain in the ass?
Thanks for any insight.
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At least at my firm managers are very willing to help out the junior staff that busted their asses on projects the past 2-4 years. I feel like it's part of their responsibility to "give back" a little and at least write recommendations.
That being said, I wouldn't approach my manager with any more than 3-4 recommendations (per round). They can be multiple pages each. Each school has different questions and while you can apply the same ideas to each you can't just do a mail merge and be done with it. Also, give them plenty of time of prior notice.
That's way to many recommendations. Generally it is not cut and paste. I'd suggest 2 max unless they literally are cut and paste, but I think when a recommender is asked to do too many, the product is a watered down ineffective recommendation. Here are some suggestions for how to get the most out of your recommendations.
How to get the best recommendations for your MBA program applications - http://bit.ly/Nj5A7
Gotta Mentor www.GottaMentor.com Connect to the Advice & People You Need to Achieve Your Career Goals
Are you serious? Why can't you just have the recommender write a standard form letter for all schools and then have them just fill out the multiple choice sections for each school?
Anyone else have opinions on this?
a standard technique is the following.
Step #1. Assemble a "master list" of questions asked by your various schools
Step #2. Ask your recommender to address each question with proper heading (ex section called leadership, section called strengths, section called constructive criticism). Be sure to provide ideas for each section (IE remember that time XXX or that time YYY)
You now have a "super" recommendation that every school will be happy with. They can zero in on the sections that they requested and ignore the other sections (or read them). The schools will not hold it against the applicant if their recommenders do not follow the exact format of their form.
This maximizes your recommendation impact (as you address each issue asked for) while minimizing the hassle for your recommender. You can then ask them to write for 4-5 schools guilt free.
wow i wanted to apply to all the top20 schools.... that will be hard...
Recommendation Letters for multiple schools (Originally Posted: 07/22/2011)
I'm planning on starting to apply to schools this coming fall and have a question about letters of recommendation. It seems like some schools do online recommendation letters and many are very specific for what each school is looking for. I'm planning on applying to quite a few schools to keep my options open. I think I may be reaching a little high applying to the top tier schools but hoping having a unique background is going to help boost my application. That being said, with undergrand it was easy to simply reuse the same recommendation letters to every school so it wasn't a burden on whoever was writing them. It seems like that isn't the case for top business schools and I could become quite a burden asking my supervisor to write 5+ recommendation letters in the fall. There are only so many people who I would want to write the letters and many schools require one of them to be your supervisor so it isn't like I can spread out the pain and ask a bunch of different people to write them. Any thoughts? I'm sure plenty of people apply to multiple schools each year so I can't be the only one with this issue.
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