Recommendations

Originally Posted by Carpe Aeternum

Can I hop in with a related question? I plan on going through formal recruitment this fall and have diligently been looking for people who can help me find alumnae willing to write recommendations for me. Like the OP I have virtually no connections and am having a lot of trouble. I contacted my local alumnae organization but never heard back; the only listed contact for anyone there is e-mail.

By mid-May, if I was still having no luck, I had planned to go through the list of GCers who are listed as willing to help with recs, find one recently active poster among each group I needed help with, and ask that person for help finding a contact. As I understand,, this is what the OP did and she mentioned that some people were upset at being contacted.

Is it not considered okay even to contact those who are listed, if I run out of options? If so, do you have any recommendations if my local group doesn't ever reply to attempts to contact them? Is it okay to go to the next closest alumnae group and ask for help?

I would try to contact the next closest alum group before going through the GC list.

That GC list, to my knowledge has not been updated in a long time -- and someone who might be considered an "active poster" may have changed their feelings about being asked to write recs for someone they don't know. Some may help point you in the right direction. Or some may give you a response you won't want to hear. Be prepared for the latter just in case.

ETA: I'd like to point out to all GCers that this thread should either be updated. If you want your name edited to add something or even removed from the list, now's probably a good time to let one of the mods know. It'd save PNMs soliciting for recs from getting a disappointing answer when they don't know better. A lot of the names I see on that list have not posted on GC for a while.

If it were up to me, that list would be gone. My personal feeling is that PNMs shouldn't be shopping for rec writers on GC anyway. It's one thing to point them in the right direction, but how can you write a rec for someone you don't know? And PNMs, how do you know that you can trust someone on GC? What if they write you a no-rec? It's a big risk.