Comments on: After You, Alphonse

By: Daniel Rosenblatt

Daniel Rosenblatt — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:32:56 +0000

And what is with Virginia and Berkeley?? reformatting a letter so it reads well as a .txt document seems like something that shouldn’t be necessary these days.

By: Dance

Dance — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 13:49:06 +0000

Addendum–little things like including the deadline in the email notification that I need to submit a letter, and including the name of the school in the subject line, would also use tech to make my life easier rather than more difficult.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:56:21 +0000

Well, for undergraduates, they have to think ahead in some cases about faculty who will be on sabbatical. I’ve occasionally written for students I know somewhat well but not as well as someone else because the professor who knows them best is away on leave. Colleagues of mine who are very well-organized who are going on leave have sometimes contacted students that they know may need recommendations to tell them to request by a certain date or miss out. I think all of the electronic-form using schools still also have a paper form that can be used instead, and so if you’ve thought ahead and gotten a sealed recommendation from someone, you’re ok.

By: JonathanGray

JonathanGray — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 23:57:04 +0000

The current system doesn’t seem to think about profs who might be in the field, or sick, or on holiday, sabbatical, etc. How do candidates in anthropology with instructors galavanting around the world manage to apply?

By: Sisyphus

Sisyphus — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:02:57 +0000

Yup yup. And the same problems are there for job applicants too. It’s especially frustrating entering in four or five pages of your data to separate on-line searches when it’s clear they are all using the same online program.

By: Micaela 07

Micaela 07 — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:24:44 +0000

I went through this last year on the applicant end and found it very frustrating as well. I almost screamed when I got to the page of the Harvard application that gave a long list of dead white men and and I had to indicate that I was not a descendant of any of them (maybe I am related to Bayard F. Newberry III, Class of 1804, but I don’t know it). One of my recommenders insisted on paper only, which all of the schools accepted.

Best of all was NYU, whose server more or less gave out two days before the deadline and wasn’t fixed until after it.

By: Dance

Dance — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:12:03 +0000

Full agreement.

I’m not sure that an assembly line of printing onto letterhead isn’t less hassle, to be honest. Especially when you add in the six new login names and passwords that need to be created.