<p>I posted this in the Parent Forum because I'm a parent but maybe I'd get a better response here - from the actual users of career services....</p>
<p>Just wondering how your kids college handles letters of recommendation. My d recently went through an internship search - applying to 15 different jobs. Her school's career services does not provide an in-house recommendation service so she used Interfolio. She found that her professors had never heard of Interfolio and had difficulty with using it - they didnt like that they had to create an account and some struggled with the electronic submission. Then she also had employers who wanted her to hand them the letter vs. sending it to them through Interfolio.
I'm wondering how other colleges handle this - it seems natural to me that Career Services would provide this in-house - compiling and sending recommendations for their students. I can see charging a fee per recommendation sent but to totally farm it out to a third party seems odd - especially for a top university.</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of a University doing the recommendation handling for a student – and I go to a school with a pretty top notch career center. In the past (for jobs that don’t have an online recommendation service) I have just provided my teacher/former employer with 15 sheets of paper and 15 envelopes (it’s much more courteous than telling them to find it on their own). I then just tell them to seal the envelope and write over the back of the flap so it was clear that I had not read or tampered with the contents. </p>
<p>More often than not I have leftover copies which have come in handy for last minute recommendations to things. If she knows where she wants to apply in advance, she can just provide her teacher/former employer with the address of the internship(s) and have it sent straight there.</p>
<p>I did not recall my son had to provide letters of recommendation in his internship search either this year or last year. He had to provide a copy of resume and then went throught interviews. I had never heard of Interfolio either.</p>
<p>Perhaps the recommendations are required because she is in Nursing. She had to send them with every application.<br>
Will have to do some specific Nursing School research to see what is common - I just assumed that the college Career Services would provide recommendation management but I guess not. In that case Interfolio offers a great service for job searches that require recommendations. I think it would be incredibly annoying as a professor to be asked to send multiple copies of a recommendation - even our high school managed the teacher recs for applications.</p>