Did your kid submit an “additional recommendation” outside of the normal teacher/counselor ones and if so, what type of rec was it/who was it from? Thanks!
My ds had one from his Scout Master.
My D had one from the head of the small non-profit where she worked 20+ hrs/wk.
Attach an additional recommendation only if the writer can speak to your kid’s unique qualities in a way that no one else (i.e. two teachers or the guidance counselor) is able to. Usually this would be an employer, a coach, a religious leader, or someone else who knows them well outside of school.
We had a somewhat unique situation. My H was my S teacher in his strongest subject and probable major. Obviously he could not write the teacher recommendation but if it wasn’t for his parental relationship he would have been the obvious choice. So we took a gamble and submitted a 3rd recommendation from my H. Having the unique perspective of parent and teacher he was able to write a very personal and insightful letter.
Did it help? We will obviously never know… But it didn’t appear to hurt. My S got into his first choice (and highly selective) school.
DS had very strong LORs written by the prof he was doing seismic research with.
My D asked her former Girl Scout Service Unit Director for a recommendation. He can speak to her commitment and service to the community over the past several years. This is very important because D attends an out of district high school and the teachers really only know her volunteer work as it relates to school clubs and such. She is not applying to selective schools but her first choice school has separate freshman school scholarships based on community service and leadership.
D will also be applying to some community based scholarships and she hopes that he can just tweak his college recommendation to fit the scholarships recommendations she will need.
Some schools clearly discourage additional recommendations; so be sure to check for each school you are applying to.
D had an additional rec from a theatre director/mentor she’d worked with since early childhood. D felt it helped her resume “make sense” because she had compartmentalized her theatre world and school world so much. Her academic teachers and counselor really didn’t know that side or her nor could they put context to the type of work she’d done which was well outside the typical high school theatre world.
A family acquaintance offered to write our DD an “Alumni Recommendation” to include with her early decision packet. That same person had also worked in the Admissions office. I’m fairly sure DD would have been admitted anyway, but it was a lovely extra to include.
My D had one (unknown to her until afterwords) from the former president of the alumni association at Cornell, who was the tech director for her high school musicals.
My son worked for a state level politician so he got a letter from him as his other.
Agree that you should definitely check if the school will accept additional recommendations.
My D asked the program coordinator of her summer internship before senior year. She had a fantastic experience and the internship was competitive and in strong support of her interests and intended major. IIRC, some schools allow an optional way to submit letters outside of the Comm App which, in her case, was linked to her HS’s Naviance LoR submission system (assuming I was understanding how it worked). For the schools that allowed it, D asked the program coordinator to email to the school’s admission office directly once she made sure a supplemental LoR was allowed.
My D was on a national team (top 8 in US) in a little known sport, which was her only EC. She included a letter of recommendation from her coach.
The Common Application only lets other recommenders upload their recommendations to schools that allow it. In other words, if a school won’t allow the extra recommendation, there will be no way to do it through the Common App, whereas if a school will allow it, the link will be right there. So you can’t make a mistake!
DD worked as an au pair, for a family with two kids under the age of 5, in a non-English speaking foreign country this summer. She plans to get a letter from them.
My older son had two. He was a computer guy whose one and only comp sci course in high school was AP Comp Sci freshman year. One letter was from the boss of the company for whom he had worked for summer before junior and senior year and part time during the school year. He’d had co-workers in the company ask him why he was bothering to go to college, so I imagine it was a pretty good recommendation. The other recommendation was from a med school professor who’d asked him to write a program that would help him analyze neuropeptides. No one in the lab knew how to write the program. The professor offered to write the letter, it hadn’t even occurred to my kid that what he did was that noteworthy! No one at the high school really knew what level of work he was capable of, so it made sense to have these recommendations.
Keep in mind that not everyone knows how to write a good recommendation letter. Especially someone who doesln’t normally write them. The additional LOR will help if it actually tells the reader something insightful about the applicant that isn’t already clear from the rest of the application. My D got an additional LOR from a non-teacher. He gave her a copy of the LOR after he sent it, and she was disappointed because it was just full of generic praise.
Oldest son got an additional rec from the PI & post-doc of a university lab where he worked full time for 10 weeks the summer before senior year. Youngest son got one from his 2 year employer…the managing partner of a tennis school that’s among the leading in the tri-state area. He worked for them year-round & took his responsibilities seriously, including the certification training.