Just curious.. about rec letters

<p>I'm just wondering.. Most of you guys seemed to have applied for at least 5 schools.. But you need 3 rec letters for every school.. Do you bother profs 15 times? Or do you just copy the letter and send it to every school?</p>

<p>Most applications are done online, so a professor usually just has to ctrl+c & ctrl+v and change the name of the school. </p>

<p>I gave my recommenders my list of 9 schools, and they typically completed all the forms within half an hour.</p>

<p>copy. some profs are nice/thorough/caring enough to somewhat tailor some of them for each school... especially if they have info on what each program specializes in or cares highly about. for the most part, it's just search and replace. speaking of which, i screwed that up on my SOP to UIUC... i left it saying 'berkeley' :-(</p>

<p>addwit, holy crap! i provided a nice, very organized folder w/ an overview of my college stuff (transcript, brief info about my project.s.. research stuff, and then every single LOR request sheet for the 11 schools... (so that they could notice what each one asks for before i applied online). it took my profs 1 month to finish them all though :-(</p>

<p>Well I'm not counting the time it actually took them to write the general recommendation. They certainly didn't write it up and submit it to 9 schools in less than 30 minutes!</p>

<p>If you add the writing time into the equation, it took my quickest writer a week, and the slowest one about 2 months.</p>

<p>Rofl ct, I was so scared of doing that.</p>

<p>It took one of my prof one hour to do mine</p>

<p>He confirmed registration at 7AM and submitted it at 8AM when I registered him at 10PM the night before</p>

<p>And another, he confirmed registration 3 months in advance and I had to follow up with him up until the deadline...fun stuff...</p>

<p>I see I see.. I was just feeling bad for asking one prof to complete 5-6 copies of the rec letter. But I guess it's not so much to ask if they're just going to copy&paste. Thanks for the reply guys!</p>

<p>A good prof won't just copy/paste. When you give them the list of schools to which you are applying, also write a couple of sentances about what it is that attracted you to each school. That way they at least have the material to customize the recommendations with if they so choose.</p>