<p>To my understanding, I must have a recommendation written by my guidance counselor. However, my class is around 800 people and the guidance counselor can't possibly know each one of us individually. How do I build a strong relationship with my guidance counselor so that by the time I ask her to write one of my recommendations she will know me well enough to write a strong one?</p>
<p>The main thing to do in that regard is to talk to your counselor as much as possible; you can think of excuses to talk to her like asking for advice about classes or scheduling or college or stuff, or you could just go in and talk to her about yourself. However, if your counselor doesn’t know you that well, it isn’t the end of the world. What a lot of people do is ask teachers or advisers to write ‘in house’ recommendations that are informal and are sent to counselors. The counselors look at what everyone else has said about you and they incorporate that into their letters. So definitely try to get to know your counselor, but don’t worry too much about this - many students don’t have close relationships with their counselors (I’m one of them - my counselors kept retiring or having to take absences so I ended up with 4 counselors in 4 years - but I was fine!) and it’s really not a big deal.</p>
<p>This thread might offer some good tips
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1341466-guidence-counsoler-evaluation.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1341466-guidence-counsoler-evaluation.html</a></p>
<p>Thank you very much!</p>
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<p>I agree with this advice, except perhaps for the use of the word excuse. If you make an appointment to discuss your college plans with your guidance counselor, that doesn’t sound like an excuse to me. That sounds like a student and a school employee both doing what’s in their job descriptions!</p>
<p>In addition, I think you don’t have to worry too much about this predicament. See this excerpt about recommendation letters on the web page of the MIT Admissions Office:</p>
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<p>[Writing</a> Recommendations | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/apply/prepare/writingrecs]Writing”>How to write good letters of recommendation | MIT Admissions)</p>
<p>H/T T26E4, who often links to this page.</p>
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I agree with this advice, except perhaps for the use of the word excuse. If you make an appointment to discuss your college plans with your guidance counselor, that doesn’t sound like an excuse to me. That sounds like a student and a school employee both doing what’s in their job descriptions!
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Haha that’s a good point, but in my case it was mainly an excuse to make my counselor know me (my counselors kept leaving or retiring so I ended up with 4 counselors in 4 years so this was a major concern for me) - most of the counselors are completely useless, so I mainly used CC as a resource and just talked to my counselor for the sake of talking to him, even though he rarely helped me at all. In other cases though, hopefully most students have a counselor who can help them out when they have questions.</p>