Hi all,
I am applying to a school via SAO, where there is not an item for optional personal rec. However, I found that in their school admission portal optional personal rec can be provided through SAO or Gateway. Is it just for Gateway? I do have a personal rec in SAO for another school. But seems there is no way for me to provide it to this school in SAO. I don’t want to bother the teacher too much to send the school an email about the personal rec. Could anyone please help with this situation? Thanks!
We asked and were told to email to admissions office. Not just for this but any material that could not be submitted through SAO or Gateway or that wasn’t available at the time of submission.
My suggestion is to look up the Gateway preview of it, and have the recommender just fill that out. Then you can just email in the pdf.
So frustrating. I wrote a whole post about it a few weeks when I figured out that the “extra recommendation” and “extra teacher recommendation” in SAO actually were linked to only 1 of 12 of my daughter’s schools, even though several schools asked for them.
Bottom line: You might be best served by finding an outside way of getting the school that recommendation. That could be: ask your recommender to do a download or screenshot and email the schools directly. (Not sure if gateway or SAO would be an easier portal in which to do that – assuming they wrote up a recommendation for you in both?).
Also, you might want to call the school admissions office and confirm with them – its their requirement so they might have some insight into whether they actually ARE able to get that rec from SAO/SSAT. (although I’m assuming that you know how to click on the school and you are seeing for yourself that they are not getting it?)
In our case, it was early enough that we just obtained another recommendation that was emailed to all the schools. It was frustrating though.
I looked through the schools one by one on their “how to apply” admission page. Some schools even don’t mention personal rec. and they don’t have any entry for personal rec on SAO too. I will just simply ignore it. But for some schools, they clearly mention the optional personal rec to be sent to their admission emails. I am kind of struggling whether I have to bother the teacher again for doing that. So exhausted!