Hello,
I was thinking of getting another recommendation letter. The non-academic ones. A person I worked closely with for planning school and charity events. How useful do you think that might be. I don’t want to send in useless stuff. I am already submitting 3 teacher recs & 1 counselor rec. Is it bad to have no non-academic recs?
Thank you
It’s not bad to not include other recs, but they can definitely help if they provide useful insight. If your other recommender knows a lot about you socially and academically, understands your work ethic, and has a lot of good, personal things to say about you, then go for it. The more positive insight that a college is provided with, the better. They typically want to get to know their applicants as much as possible before admitting them.
I disagree with @rhiannaps not as much as possible --as much as necessary. The danger with this 4th rec letter is that it waters down your file. They’re not going to allot more time reading your file than to someone else who submits the 2 allowed rec letters.
Why colleges complain about students’ submitting too much is that subsequent rec letters often (although not always) simply repeat the same platitudes found in other LORs.
Make sure the college allows other recommendation letters. Otherwise, it will likely just get throw out, wasting the writer’s time. Worst case scenario, some admissions offices even frown on not following instructions if they explicitly say what number of rec letters they want.
But if they allow/encourage more rec letters, then by all means! A non-academic letter would likely give another view of you. Only you can figure out how useful it would be though. If the letter would mostly be a copy of what your other letter’s say, then not too helpful. But if it’s something different that the college needs to know about you, then very useful.