<p>I'm applying to upenn in the fall, so I need to start getting recommendations. I think my teacher recs will be great, but the counselors at my school are practically worthless. Not to mention I just got transferred to a new one, who isn't any better. </p>
<p>Any advice on how to make sure she doesn't send out a meaningless, pre-written, generic mess of a recommendation?</p>
<p>Ya, I hate those counselors. The standard advice is to just really get your counselor to like you, which would make it much more likely that they would write you a less generic rec. Now I would also consider mentioning to the counselor that colleges of this high caliber really do value personal recs.</p>
<p>Yea lol. We have a ton of kids at my school. They honestly don’t care, and they probably couldn’t pick out any of the kids in the top 1% of each class. At one point, we had a mandatory meeting with one of the counselors, and they gave every student the same power point and speech about college. She looked at my transcript and said, “you seem to be doing well, I guess you’re already thinking about going to college.” then when I told her that I’m applying to various top schools, she sort of laughed. Like thanks for the support? The counselors are probably the worst part of my school. Maybe if they did their job for once, we could send a few students to decent colleges.</p>
<p>I guess all I can do is suck up for the next few months…</p>
<p>Sounds like a tough situation 
Sorry about your poor counselors. I guess the best thing you can do is just to talk to her a lot when you have time. But don’t just suck up, try to have some actual conversations. While talking about something like favorite movies or other stuff like that seems trivial, it at least opens doors to prolonged conversations that helps to personalize your relationship with them. Try to get to know them as they try to get to know you.</p>
<p>The thing is, they are all so rude. You have to schedule an appointment to see them, sometimes days in advance because they are so “busy.” one time I walked into their office, and they were just having a casual conversation. They saw me and slammed the office door in my face, so I was just sitting in the lobby for like 5 minutes by myself. And whenever you ask them a question about college, they respond, “it depends.” so i’m not sure how I would even go about just talking to her.</p>
<p>This sounds typical in a lot schools that don’t send a lot students to ivies. She even cancelled the appoint without notifying students. Is it possible to go without GC’s recommendation?</p>
<p>I know what you mean ivystriver2, my counselors are so stupid, she acts like its a hassle whenever i ask her for something, and always really “busy”. She doesn’t know anything about top colleges, just told me to take every hard class if i wanted to go to one -_-</p>
<p>Haha. That sounds about right.</p>
<ol>
<li>You can’t change your counselor. </li>
<li>Your counselor isn’t exactly the only one in this country who is at that level.</li>
<li>Admission officials aren’t stupid. They will know whether to admit or reject you based on your entire application, not just based on counselor rec.</li>
<li>Unless you got F’s littered all over the place, have been expelled/suspended, etc, counselor rec probably won’t be the major factor in deciding your admission. Worry about stuff you can do something about, not something you can do almost nothing about and won’t play much role in evaluation of your application.</li>
</ol>