College application season is winding down, but for some staff members on campus letters of recommendation are still being cranked out.
For senior Janhavi Swaminathan, asking a teacher for a recommendation letter who knew her personally was key.
“For [Ashley Harrison now Ashley Worsham], I saw her everyday because I had AMSTUD and that was every single day so I feel like she got to know me really personally and then she saw me in both APUSH and AP Language side so we were really close,” Swaminathan said.
According to M-R counselor Angela Lewis, she writes about 90-100 college recommendation letters which can be a challenge without some help from students.
“Because we have so many students that participate in so many things, have so many different backgrounds, and different stories we ask that our students submit a brag sheet,” Lewis said. “We also ask that their parents submit a brag sheet to just fill us in and give us a better holistic view of the students in and out of school so we can then take that information and write a pretty decent recommendation letter.”
Some teachers feel like college recommendation letters help the chances of college acceptance because they can write about different skills or traits students have that can’t be seen from test scores.
“The things that I like to highlight in my recommendation letters are specific personality traits or skills that I saw in the classroom, that [may] [not be] reflected on GPA,” social studies teacher Whitney Schell said. “For example, I often highlight a lot of my kids’ discussion skills in class. [We] have a lot of class discussions and that allows me to show the college that they are deep critical thinkers, or maybe they’re bringing in current events. These [are] things that they cannot get from just their GPA or SAT scores.”
But college recommendation letters aren’t limited to people on campus as some seniors reached out to professionals who specialize in the same topic as what the students want to major in.
“I want to major in something like Pre-Med, so neuroscience or biomedical science,” Swaminathan said. “I asked an M.D. that I shadow. It’s like a doctor that I shadow so they could get a perspective out of school,”
