Professional Recommender - Must be someone you’ve worked with on a community or volunteer activity - and it says they must know your personal characteristics, abilities, achievements, motivation, and potential - so it still has to be someone that knows you pretty well.
@Southern5062 Yea, that’s what I was thinking. Just wondering because @CourtneyThurston was a Scholar IIRC.
@jswani I’m asking my volunteer supervisor to do my recommendation since she already wrote me a letter of recommendation for some other stuff, I’d say either a volunteer coordinator or an employer who knows your style well. Good luck everyone!!!
@jjoojjoo As long as that person knows you well I don’t see why not:) good luck!
Hence why I said “…that you possibly can”
So if your governor knows you, then yes, use your governor. If the biggest person who knows you well is a principal, then go with a principal.
@CourtneyThurston Thank you! I see what you’re saying.
@CourtneyThurston so the professional recommender doesn’t have to be a person who has worked with you on community service, right?
Back in my day I think it had to be, @jjoojjoo
I forget though. Read their instructions, things may have changed.
I got rejected and I feel like it was probably a combo of not enough volunteer hours (I only have about 350) and the application having no place to list activities that are neither volunteering nor school-sponsored, like club sports (such as ski racing).
@ski_racer And honestly, who knows when the process is done by a computer. I understand they have no better way to analyze all 100,000+ of their applications but something so stat-based always seems unfair.
@jswani As my mama says, deniers gonna deny.
@jjoojjoo Re: the Professional Recommender - Yes, they must have worked with you directly, either in a community / volunteer service capacity, or as an employer.
Quoting from the application cover:
“The recommender you select should be knowledgeable enough about you, both academically and personally, to provide insight into your personal characteristics, abilities, achievements, motivation, and potential.
Your Professional Recommendation should be from someone with whom you have worked on a community or volunteer service activity OR from an employer.”
I know this was super callous of me and forgive me, but my guestimations of my community service were super off. I slowed down and actually calculated for this round. Turns out I’m about 200 hours off. Should I just submit whatever I have now or should I just submit based on my first round of application? I really don’t want to appear like I was lying in last round of apps (in either direction, I don’t want to disclose), but I do want to represent myself honestly.
Maybe, in particular, @CourtneyThurston could speak to this?
If you made good-faith guestimations I’d just stick with those. Most people guess on their apps, it’s not their 100% precise & accurate hour count on their apps: the winners do so much stuff that it’s honestly impossible to fully calculate, so everybody just guesses. Just don’t do stuff in bad faith and it’ll be fine.
I honestly didn’t think I would get chosen as a semi-finalist and somehow I did. The issue is that I didn’t make a copy of my application so now when they are asking for a lot of the same information again, I’m doing it off of what I remember (especially with my guestimation of how many volunteer hours), so does anyone know if there’s any way to access our old application because I don’t want to submit any inaccurate information.
@mli701 I couldn’t find a way. Fortunatley I saved a copy for that very reason - with the community service hours, it was a real guesstimate. (I learned the hard way about saving a copy so didn’t make that mistake this time), But I poked around the aplocation and coulnd’t find a way - then found the one I had saved. I guess you could ask them?
@mli701 if you find a way, please share! im in the same boat. didn’t even cross my mind to make a copy
@mli701 @cambellssoup Quite honestly, I don’t think they will go back and compare them. That is just my gut feeling. With 150,000 applicants on initial round, and no essays, the semifinalists were selected by a computer, based on an algorithm of weighted values. I have to beleive they’ve been doing this so many years, they know there semi-finalists that change things on the second round - not out of dishonesty, but because on the first application, I know I was
just using my calculator briskly trying to come up with a fair guesstimate. Don’t get too worked up over it. Just do the best you can.
Semifinalist here from a small, unranked public school in the suburbs. We have rapidly improved and grown since my freshman year though. One coke scholar from two years ago, three semifinalists now.
for the personal recommendation it says it can be from a counselor, teacher, or principal, but when prompted, it says “enter the name and email address of your hs guidance counselor or principal below”. it also says that the person will be prompted to submit a secondary school report form. i want to use my teacher, but i’m kind of confused.