Does having three (good) vs two (good) letters of rec really change your chances of admission? I currently have one professor and one professional mentor. I don’t know that I will be able to get a second professor- does it really matter?
Also edit** I’ve been out of school and working full time for over a year and a half now
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leaving a comment bc I'm in the same exact position lol
AdComm perspective here!
I have never voted to admit someone because I received a third letter of rec. Never.
Fwiw:
1) These are the last things I'm reading in the application. By the time I get to the LoRs, I know whether I want to vote to admit, waitlist, or deny. I'll take the LoRs into consideration ... but I've already been reading this file for like 15ish minutes. Do I want more to read? Not really, because...
2) What I've found from experience is that I almost always learn the same things from each academic letter, and I usually learn the same things from each professional letter. Hearing something a third time and/or fourth time isn't "helpful." It's just "more."
So if you've been our of school for a year and have one academic and one professional rec, you're fine!
try getting an employer. not all of them have to be academic.
I only have one locked down and the second professor I asked is ghosting me😭
I asked a few law students at T14 schools about this, and all of them told me that law schools value academic recommenders over workplace recommenders. I'm not an expert and it definitely depends the quality of recommendation you can get from a workplace vs academic recommender, but if you can get two good academic recs I would. Also, if you look at the admissions prediction model on 7Sage it says that admissions decisions are ~80% predicted by GPA and LSAT, so everything else is secondary to getting a great LSAT score.
I'm struggling to get another professor recommendation