Although an often overlooked aspect of the college application process, letters of recommendation can be leveraged as a powerful tool to sell yourself as an applicant to colleges.
Letters of recommendation from teachers, counselors, and other sources help colleges see a more complete pictures of applicants. Often, they're one of the few ways, if not the only way, an admissions officer can learn about prospective students from the perspective of someone else.
*Note: Many/most of these tips still apply if you want a recommendation letter for a summer program, internship, other non-college reason. The LOR form would still work great as well.
FERPA And What It Means
Before you can invite recommenders, you have to answer a question asking whether or not you would like to waive your FERPA rights. You only have to answer this once.
But what is FERPA? To be clear, if you do not waive your rights, you cannot access your letter of recommendation before it is submitted, or even before decisions. FERPA lets you request access to your recommendation letters after being accepted and enrolling in a school.
Not waiving your FERPA rights doesn't matter as much as many people believe it to be. Many admissions officials have such a high volume of applications to look over they don't even notice which box you check.
Nonetheless, I still would recommend to waive your FERPA rights. First, it encourages your recommenders to be forthright, and for those adcoms who do notice, they won't have to wonder if you're hiding something, or if you don't trust the people you chose to write your recommendations. Not to mention that there is little to no advantage to retaining your FERPA rights; you can only read them if you get in (at which point you can be pretty sure that they were decent recommendations and likely wouldn't care that much), and many institutions, such as Yale and Stanford, purge their admissions files post-decision—so you can't see your LORs anyway.
Choosing Teachers
Ideally, the teacher who writes your recommendation has known you for a long time, has a positive opinion of you as a student and applicant, and can draw upon specific examples to illustrate your virtues. What you don't want is a generic letter of recommendation; if you're a good student, but the teacher can't say anything more about you to distinguish you from the other good students, then the letter of recommendation means very little to the people reading your application. Before asking a teacher, think to yourself whether you stood out in the class.
It's best if you ask a teacher who taught you in either sophomore or junior year (and it's even better if the teacher taught an honors, AP, or IB class); these teachers are the most recent ones who have had you for a whole year. Unless you are absolutely sure that a 12th-grade teacher can write you a drop-dead amazing letter of rec, steer clear.
Generally, colleges ask for two letters of recommendation from teachers in core subjects. Different colleges have different requirements. For example, some colleges will let you submit a letter of recommendation from teachers teaching elective subjects, and others, like MIT, specifically request one letter from a teacher who teaches math/science and another letter from a teacher who teaches humanities/social science/language.
It's a good rule of thumb to ask for recommendations from one STEM teacher and one social sciences/humanities teacher, but don't sacrifice quality of the recommendation just for that STEM/humanities balance. If the teachers who know you the best and can write you the best LOR are your calculus and biology teachers, or your English and history teachers, then don't be afraid to ask them. I promise it's much more important to get the best letters of recommendation you can than to fulfill some unspoken rule.
Asking Teachers
You should ask teachers for recommendations as soon as you can. If that's the first couple weeks of the school year, then so be it. The minimum time you should allow recommenders is two weeks prior to the deadline, but the more time, the better—especially if it's a teacher who may be juggling other recommendation requests at the same time.
Be sure to be nice and professional when you ask teachers to write you an LOR. If you can, ask in person. If that's out of the question, make sure your email correspondence is both pleasant and grammatically flawless. Whether in person or over email, it can never hurt to catch up with the teacher a little bit, and to include some nice and genuine (but not obvious) compliments and fond memories you have with them.
It's important to provide your teacher with all the relevant information they might need. In addition to mentioning specific experiences that help them distinguish you as an individual (and that they can then use in their recommendation), be sure to give them logistical information as well. You can pick up a hard copy form in the counseling office, or you can use the digital version that I made and later print it off or email it to your teachers.
After a teacher agrees to write you an LOR, don't just leave them hanging! Send them an email or drop by to thank them again for agreeing to write you a recommendation letter, and ask them if there's any more information they need from you. It's smart to also contact them periodically before the letter is due to make sure they haven't forgotten, but please, please, please make sure that you aren't bugging them! Teachers are busy, they aren't getting paid extra to write you this, and if you irritate them, that definitely won't reflect well on your recommendation letter.
Extra Recommendation Letters: To Do Or Not To Do
Do not do.
In general, avoid sending extra papers with your application unless you've done some kind of nationally- or internationally-recognized work in an area; when it comes to college applications and quantity for the sake of quantity, less really is more. If you think that sending five letters of recommendation will strengthen your application, I promise you it will not.
If the school accepts additional letters of recommendation, and if you genuinely think that an extra one will really help to make you shine as an applicant, then X + 1 LORs (where X is the required number) is more than adequate. I really wouldn't suggest going beyond that.
In most cases, the three required letters of rec (one from your guidance counselor, two from your teachers) are sufficient. Many schools have a third optional teacher letter of recommendation, but it truly is optional. If anything, unless that third teacher can say something really unique and awesome about you that the other two didn't cover (which can then make admissions officers wonder why you didn't choose that third teacher as one of your first two), avoid asking for one. I have a hard time imagining a situation where you should go the route of three teacher recs.
This holds mostly true for supplemental letters of recommendation as well. Do not send in more than one supplemental LOR, and if you do decide to send in one, make sure that it can provide a wholly new perspective on you, one that has not yet been shown in your application. Supplemental LORs should be from someone who's seen you in a non-academic setting, like a research mentor, coach, employer, etc, because otherwise there really is no point.
Maybe you're not convinced. Let's contextualize why you don't want to send in five or eight letters of rec.
Multiple admissions officers adhere to the edict, "The thicker the file, the thicker the kid" (heard verbatim). Having more recommendation letters than what they ask for makes you look obnoxious, like you can't follow directions, and like you're over-compensating. Many admissions officers at top-tier institutions have openly admitted they stop reading LORs after a certain point.
And that's without mentioning that each application gets maybe 10-15 minutes of consideration. If you try to cram in more materials than necessary, that takes away from other (and potentially more important) aspects of your application, and it forces your application reader to cover the whole of your application more shallowly.
After The Fact
Please remember to thank your teachers for writing you a letter of recommendation. They took a lot of time out of their day to write one for you on top of their other responsibilities; they didn't get a break from teaching classes or grading papers, and they weren't compensated for it. Shooting them a casual "Thanks!" over email isn't going to cut it.
A nice card (it doesn't even have to be long) goes a long way, and if you get them some chocolates or some kind of mug or animal plush on top of that, you're golden. It also definitely doesn't hurt to check in on them later and let them know where you got in.
Make no mistake, while letters of recommendation are a powerful tool, it is deceptively easy to misstep. But now you know the ins-and-outs, so good luck!
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