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Lessons learned from the recommendations hunt: start early and be persistent!
Although she knew from a fairly early point in the college process what her first choice school was, she understood that the scholarship money offered would be a huge factor in where she would ultimately attend. Because of this, the decision between the final two schools really wasn’t made until the beginning of April. We didn’t start seeking recommendations until then because it seemed weird to start asking for recs without knowing where they’d be sent. I wish we had started earlier. It was harder than we thought it would be.
She asked teachers at school but only came out with three from that approach. We had no difficulty securing recs from my GLO, but asking around my general friend group only netted us three other groups. Frustratingly, I appeared to know about 7 people from a group that I was surprised to realize was not at her school. She researched the social media of older girls she knew from activities she had been involved in and managed to get one more from a recent college graduate. We adjusted our goals to getting at least one for each organization.
At this point she began trying to contact local alumnae groups to ask if anyone would be willing to meet with her and consider writing a rec. She got more this way and then contacted the local alumnae panhellenic group to ask for contacts at about the last five. They gave her contact info for four – they didn’t have a rep for the last one. She got three more recs from that.
Ultimately she was out of time and managed to secure at least one rec for 15 of the 17 sororities on campus. One of the groups she had tried to approach three different ways (including 2 different points of contact from the local panhellenic) with no response; and the other we were just never able to locate at all. We googled to no avail and their national website required signing in to find alumnae chapters.
I’d like to mention that she very much enjoyed meeting all of the different women from the various alumnae groups. She went to a lot of coffee shops! Everyone was really great to her and I think that it was excellent prep for recruitment itself.
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