<p>I don't know what he was thinking! He emailed the letter of recommendation to both the admission commitee and me in the same email. So the adcom can see that he sent it to me as well.....
Am I screwed? I'm freaking out. I have no idea why the hell he did this! .. . . . .!</p>
<p>This was the first time I saw it. I opened it. It’s good for the most part, except there were some unnecessary capitalizations at places. I’m starting to think he was drunk or something when sending this. Ughhh I’m so frustrated right now.</p>
<p>Awesome…he used the same program name(sending a letter to Stanford when I applied for another university) for all of them. Seriously what the hell.</p>
<p>You don’t say whether this is for an REU or graduate school. It is in the Graduate School forum but usually most graduate applications have an online system for submitting LORs so you would not have gotten it. I am a bit confused.</p>
<p>That being said, in either case don’t stress about it. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>There is nothing you can do about this except (and I am not sure I recommend this since I do not know your relationship with the professor) gently remarking to the professor that he mistakenly included you on the email. If you suspect this is a general problem, find someone else to write your LORs in the future.</p></li>
<li><p>The name swapping happens a lot. I see it in graduate applications sent to IIT and I mistakenly did it once when the student had asked me for many letters of recommendation and I tried to personalize each one. A PDF file was not written out and the wrong one was sent. I also see LORs and SOPs that call my university “ITT” instead of “IIT” so I just ignore that stuff. Remember that the evaluation is done on the totality of the application not just one LOR.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Sorry this is not for grad school or REU. It’s for another summer program.
Will him including me in the email affect me? I suppose they might not notice.
Should I ask him to resend the ones with te wrong names?</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s going to be a big deal. The name swapping is unfortunate, but I don’t think anyone will hold it against you. I don’t think being included is a big deal, either. Are you worried because of the whole “waive your right to read your LOR” issue? It’s not totally uncommon for a LOR writer to show their letter to the applicant-- it’s not breaking any rules for you to see it, and the adcoms may not even notice/care.</p>
<p>I think it is a courtesy to cc others on notes wish you want them to see and the fact he cc’d you just means he does not care about you seeing what he wrote about you. Was the letter well written? ( Except for what you mentioned as errors) Did he say enough about your quals? I would worry about the substance of the letter versus the cc.</p>
<p>Should I ask my recommender to resend it?</p>
<p>I haven’t had much experience with this, but I would ask your recommender to resend it. THIS TIME, make sure you tell him not to include your email in the ‘to’ or ‘cc’ field. </p>
<p>I’m curious to see if this would look bad on an applicant? I don’t think it should since this is completely out of your control and if the admissions committee hold this against you, I would probably not want to go wherever you applied anyways.</p>
<p>My friend’s mom is on an adcom for some summer program and reads a lot of LORs for grad school. She told me she’s seen letters where the prof sent a letter with the wrong student’s name.</p>
<p>No, don’t ask the professor to resend it. That’s silly - it’s the same information, with the tiny detail that it wasn’t sent to you this time, but whoever got it will have already seen that it was sent to you so really it’ll just be a duplicate and it will only serve to annoy the school and possibly the professor who wrote it.</p>
<p>Generally speaking, professors get a LOT more slack than students when it comes to spelling and grammar errors, wrong school/program, lateness, etc. They’re not trying to impress anyone and most programs realize that students have little to no control over that.</p>
<p>I sent him a email politely informing him of the errors and including me in the email. He said he’ll resend it (I didn’t ask him to). </p>
<p>None of these programs asked provided a confidentiality form of any kind. Some did say that if you want to mail it to the physical address, the letter needs to be in a sealed envelope. I think that implies it should be confidential? That same school also said they don’t care if the letter is confidential or not. I’m not sure how this is with the other programs. </p>
<p>There’s also a chance that they didn’t see my address in the to field. I imagine the people receiving emails are busy and just read the contents and download the pdf, which probably doesn’t leave them with that much time to glance at the ‘to’ field.</p>
<p>What’s the problem?</p>
<p>It sounds like he included you as a courtesy. There’s no rule saying that applicants cannot read their letters. It’s even fine to read your letters if you signed a confidentiality agreement. The standard FERPA waiver prevents you from forcibly obtaining the letter from the recipient<a href=“sometimes%20they%20are%20legally%20required%20to%20give%20you%20access%20to%20all%20information%20in%20your%20file,%20including%20letters,%20unless%20you’ve%20waived%20that%20right”>/u</a>. That assures your reference that you won’t see the letter if he doesn’t want you to see it.</p>
<p>It’s always fine to see your own letter if your professor offers to let you see it.</p>
<p>Omg he did what???</p>
<p>Your prof must be really high.</p>