<p>My boyfriend is applying to Computer Science Ph.D. programs. Since he has a computer science/anthropology interest, he has 1 anthropology faculty member writing a letter of recommendation and two C.S. faculty writing recommendations. Everyone seems to be on the ball getting letters in, except one of the C.S. LOR writers. </p>
<p>We don't really know if he is doing it because he's purposely being a jerk or just majorly slacking off, but this faculty member has only submitted 3 out of 14 letters, many of which were due in early December or January. </p>
<p>He has reminded this faculty member several times, trying not to make him angry to reflect in his letters, and each time is told he'll get around to it or he's been out of town. He's had the recommendation info for over 6 weeks and seems to be just sitting around. </p>
<p>As you can imagine, we are quite worried about this. He comes from a small C.S. department, so it will be hard to get another letter from a faculty member. He has employers that might be willing to write him one, but he is concerned that only having one CS faculty recommender will be harmful to his application. Unfortunately, he also has not been able to contact any of the Universities he is applying to about this problem because of a heavy work schedule. </p>
<p>Anyone have any ideas about what we can do?</p>
<p>Make this as easy as possible for the professor. He probably genuinely forgets or has lost the links sent by universities and doesn't want to have to dig them out of the black void that is a professor's email account. Hopefully your boyfriend can find five minutes to walk into his office and hand him a bundle of stamped, addressed envelopes. Offer to give the CS departmental secretary a list of addresses so she can manually add them to the top of the letters and print them, deliver them to him to sign, and put in said envelopes. Of course, when people offer to bend over backwards for others, the others usually decline and take care of things themselves. Or he could take up the offer and shove all the work on the secretary. Either way, it will get done.</p>
<p>For the schools this guy has missed whose deadlines were mid-December - early January, do you guys think his application will still be reviewed by the admissions committee with a missing LOR?</p>
<p>This happened to me for application to biomed programs. I gave the professor stuff in the 2nd week of September, along with stamped, addressed envelopes, and he didn't do it until he got multiple emails from some admissions committees (because I was CC'ed that's how I knew.</p>
<p>Luckily, it was ok, since my app was reviewed and I was offered for an interview at UPenn-BGS. But since my writer refused to do them online, I got rejected from UMich-PIBS because of an incomplete app...</p>
<p>Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe schools will reject you SIMPLY because of an incomplete application, as long as you've paid the fee and done everything else in your power to finish it. I know a few people who went through a similar situation, i.e. their apps were incomplete due to one or two missing LOR's. They were both explicitedly told that they would be evaluated fairly, according to the existing parts of their application after the deadline-- which is to say, for example, if your missing LOR was absolutely ho-hum and would not do any good or bad, you would have the same admissions result either way.</p>
<p>Yeah one of my three recs just got hers off, this has me a little worried, but it wasn't really her fault, serious circumstances itervened, and do you really want to go to a program that rejects you simply because one of your profs was a little late? I would try to get it there later rather than never, your app is probably good enough to not get thrown in the reject pile, but might need the last rec to get tossed in the accepted pile.</p>
<p>ymmit, I figure as much, but my online notification still isn't in for UMich-PIBS (which I can see for letters of rec.) for that one professor, even though I've gotten notifications from all other schools that it is in now. And when my other writers submitted, I got immediate confirmation by email. I mean, can't do anything about it now, but sucks that I wasted money because of that one professor. But at least he got it in finally to all other programs.</p>