Another Recommender Questions - Type?

[goldberry]

So I didn't know until now that most colleges on the common app won't accept "other recommenders".  DDs primary recommender is a lady who coached the competitive science team DD has participated in for the last 4 years.  She has coached various events and has spent hours and hours with DD, has seen her interact with the team and at competitions.  She's not really a "teacher" though.

 

DD does have a couple of actual teachers we can contact, but none of them have taught more than one class with her.  They will have good things to say but not substantial, ya know?

 

Any advice?

[angela in ohio]

Only one of dd's colleges didn't accept "other" recommenders. (We actually contacted them and they added it.)

 

If the college she is applying to only accepts teacher recommendations, I would list her as a teacher. If they also accept coaches, that would be an option, too.

[Julie of KY]

I just listed our academic coach as a teacher. He's a teacher in real life and knows my son through math competitions. He's just not had my son in a classroom setting.

We also listed a teacher that had taught some elective classes as a classroom teacher.

 

I told the coach I was looking for an academic recommendation and to just put not applicable or answer as best as he could any supplemental questions. It should be clear from his recommendation the setting he knows my son in.

[GoodGrief]

One of my daughter's "teacher" recommenders was a retired teacher who taught her homeschool science class (as the grandfather of one of the other kids in the co-op). He was not affiliated with a school, and had not been for many years. Another was the Mandarin instructor that tutored her for years outside of a school setting. I do think you need to prepare people in that situation for the Common App format though, and how to deal with the setup. Someone recommended setting up a dummy account and sending yourself a teacher rec so you could see what was involved. I never went that far, because somehow we muddled through, but I could see it being helpful.

 

We also used a dual enrollment instructor, as well as a couple of the AP Homeschoolers teachers. Basically, we tried to get many recommenders because not everyone is going to finish filling out the form. For schools that accept "other" recommenders, along with the teachers, including someone in that category can provide a fuller picture of the student, if the teacher is not so close to the kid.

 

My daughter had a couple of coaches, music teachers, a pastor; anybody that we thought might fill out the form. Then she picked and chose which ones to send where.

[hopskipjump]

So I didn't know until now that most colleges on the common app won't accept "other recommenders".  DDs primary recommender is a lady who coached the competitive science team DD has participated in for the last 4 years.  She has coached various events and has spent hours and hours with DD, has seen her interact with the team and at competitions.  She's not really a "teacher" though.

 

DD does have a couple of actual teachers we can contact, but none of them have taught more than one class with her.  They will have good things to say but not substantial, ya know?

 

Any advice?

 

We also ran into this last year. My first plan was to have the preferred recommender just fill it out as a "teacher" ... just saying in the form itself what it was that she actually DOES... but the form actually has some very specific questions before they get to the part where they get to fill out the recommendation itself. They have to "rank" the student for several things that are definitely classroom related, they're asked how well they participate in classroom discussions, etc.

 

We didn't feel comfortable asking the recommender to fill that information out "wrongly," so it threw a loop into dds recommender plans. Luckily, her recommender figured out a way around it, slightly (she HAD been a teacher of dds in a co-op setting... but her recommendation really had nothing to DO with that relationship, but rather another working relationship dd and this person had established through the years. So, she filled it in as the teacher for the subject that she had taught, and then wrote her recommendation briefly alluding to that experience, and included the other, more substantive information as well).

 

Luckily, some of the colleges DID accept "other" recommenders, so she had her other recommenders fill in the "other recommender" form and then just picked-and-chose which person's recommendation to send to which schools as she applied.

 

I had always assumed that most schools would require, at minimum, 3 personal references. I was stumped when we realized that many only wanted the a) counselor's letter and b) a teacher's recommendation.