<p>if one of your family members or friends (could be anyone) went to harvard and wrote a letter of rec for you, how much would it help you? alot?
there is this one girl who got into stanford basically from a letter of rec from a close family friend.</p>
<p>"there is this one girl who got into stanford basically from a letter of rec from a close family friend."</p>
<p>Yup this is definitely how you would get into HYPS.... </p>
<p>.......in the freakin 1950's!!!</p>
<p>Letter of rec. from an alumni would help only a tad bit more than that from a non-alumni, and these letters of rec. do not hold that much significance to begin with in modern college admissions.</p>
<p>How would that girl know what it was that impressed the Stanford adcom?</p>
<p>well the girl who got into stanford graduated this year. i'm not an expert, but i just know that she was a nobody who did nothing that significant for stanford to take notice and i'm assuming this letter of rec helped her out alot.
again, the admissions office is never predictable. just wanted to know how much a letter of rec would increase an applicant's chance.</p>
<p>though thanks for the input gqunit</p>
<p>don't assume anything, she could be an ethnic or socio-economic minority. The only thing that could weigh a lot is if her parents are famous or if they donated 2 mil+ to the university. Other than that, a letter from an alumni won't cut it. Besides, it's a freaking alumni, if it was like that, people would be paying alumni from all the top schools to write letters for them. The admissions office take all of that into account and won't see it as very significant compared to the whole picture.</p>
<p>Agreed with Hamman, you shouldn't assume you know anything about this girl. My boyfriend overheard a conversation between two of my classmates who could not believe I got into Harvard, because "she's not that smart, her grades and scores can't be that great" and "she doesn't do any big ec's." They could not be further from the truth... I had an uw 4.0, great scores and great ecs that they just weren't aware of... and this is in a school with 36 kids in the graduating class! My point is, if my classmates could know so little about me, imagine how little you know about this girl! I promise you, she did not just get in because a relative who went to Stanford wrote her a letter. There has to be something else going on that you just aren't aware of.</p>
<p>One of my friends stoped writting rec letter a couple years ago for applicants because she said it did not seem to make any differences even she had done that for years. She also stopped doing interview a while back because she did not feel her valuations were counted.</p>