<p>If I'm not mistaken, the Common Application requires a recommendation from the student's guidance counselor, right? Well I feel like this will be a weak part of my application, because our guidance counselor has so many kids to deal with and to put through the application process, so he does not really get to know any of them personally. I feel like my (and all others') recommendations will be extremely impersonal.</p>
<p>My best friend will be attending MIT in the fall (he applied his junior year), so he already went through this. He said that he read our counselor's recommendation, and it was very impersonal, and didn't depict him that well. Additionally, there were multiple grammatical errors and the writing was overall poor. Will all of this affect the way the admissions officers look at me? How much of a factor is the counselor recommendation? My school isn't even that big (1000 kids or so overall), and I can imagine that the situation is a lot worse for the schools with 3000-5000 kids.</p>
<p>I had the same question as you before, and I’m in the same situation. I’m in a decent size school of about 2400, and I’m getting a new counselor this year. Needless to say he/she won’t know me very well.</p>
<p>To answer your questions, the counselor rec really doesn’t have much of an impact. If your counselor can add something meaningful, then great. If not (if it’s just generic), then colleges will look to other areas and other recs. You may approach your counselor to ask him if he is willing to simply write that he doesn’t know you well, as to avoid giving a flimsy recommendation. </p>
<p>The reason you never see people around CC or anywhere else saying “make sure you have good counselor recs” is because they don’t really matter. Colleges understand that the majority of the GC recs are generic and impersonal, or even non-existent.</p>
<pre><code>I do not really know Mike very well. He has come to me for routine matters, but generally has not had any problems that he has discussed with me. In this large school, I do not always have the time to personally get to know each of my advisees. From the comments I get from Mike’s teachers, I have the impression that he is one of the strongest students this school has seen.
</code></pre>
<p>Critique: We do not learn very much from this report, but we understand why. The counselor is very honest and we are not left guessing as to the reason there is not more information and will turn our attention to other parts of the application.</p>
<ul>
<li>If needed, I would simply ask your guidance counselor to note that he doesn’t know you very well because of the class size.</li>
</ul>
<p>I’ve also heard colleges understand that lots of larger high schools have guidance counselors with hundreds of students they couldn’t possibly all know personally. Agree that this is not a big deal and they will look to other parts of the application.</p>
<p>Thanks guys! That makes me feel a lot better. In this event, I don’t even see why there is a need for a counselor recommendation; although i suppose it can be helpful for some people.</p>