Recommendation Dilemma

Colleges and Universities A-Z Brown University
1

Brown requires 2 teacher recommendations and offers 2 optional teacher recommendations. However, they do not have a choice for any outside recommenders, which is a bummer because I believe my outside recommender’s LOR will be pretty good.

I emailed Brown admissions about this and they said that the recommender could send their LOR directly to their email if they wished. This is good news for me, however, I realized that admissions officers had a short period of time for each application. Would this additional LOR, having to sort out my name through the pile of emails, reading it, etc make them annoyed and actually hurt my application? I am stuck as I really would like this outside recommender to submit their LOR, but not sure if I want to take the risk of annoying the admissions officers.

Thank you in advance!

2

Depends on who the outside person is and how well they know you. If it’s from your local state senator because you worked in his office for a summer but he never remembered your name, don’t bother. If it’s from your debate team coach and you were captain of the team, probably going to be more useful.

3

While this clip comes from Yale, I think it provides good guidance on supplemental LoR’s. https://admissions.yale.edu/advice-putting-together-your-application

4

Enough people send a third recommendation letter that I don’t think it’s an issue. Agree with bruno that it needs to be someone who really knows you.