I am applying to the Jan-term EMBA program at Columbia.
The school requests two recommender's, but the format is somewhat unusual. Instead of requesting a general letter of recommendation there is instead an online form which the recommender fills out. This form has several fields such as "What is your relationship to and how long have you known the applicant...", "Please compare the applicants performance to those of his/her peers", "How does the applicant accept criticism", "Please provide a short list of adjectives describing the applicant's strengths" etc. etc.
The available space is only 2000 characters for these questions. This leaves little room for story-telling, or relating an anecdote and instead means the recommender can only fill in a short, paraphrased blurb answering the question very directly and succinctly.
What should be my strategy be when instructing the recommender to fill these out? It seems there is very little room to be creative. I thought that the letters of recommendation are extremely important in positioning myself. I'm surprised that the school has left very little room to customize or personalize them.
There is an option to upload a traditional letter of recommendation but on the application itself it STRONGLY (in Bold) discourages this and encourages that recommender's use the form.
Thoughts on this? Are the EMBA recommendations simply not as important as the Full-Times?
Should I work closely with my recommender to craft 2000 character stories? Seems as if we would almost have to write poetry or a haiku to tell a story in such a small space!
The school requests two recommender's, but the format is somewhat unusual. Instead of requesting a general letter of recommendation there is instead an online form which the recommender fills out. This form has several fields such as "What is your relationship to and how long have you known the applicant...", "Please compare the applicants performance to those of his/her peers", "How does the applicant accept criticism", "Please provide a short list of adjectives describing the applicant's strengths" etc. etc.
The available space is only 2000 characters for these questions. This leaves little room for story-telling, or relating an anecdote and instead means the recommender can only fill in a short, paraphrased blurb answering the question very directly and succinctly.
What should be my strategy be when instructing the recommender to fill these out? It seems there is very little room to be creative. I thought that the letters of recommendation are extremely important in positioning myself. I'm surprised that the school has left very little room to customize or personalize them.
There is an option to upload a traditional letter of recommendation but on the application itself it STRONGLY (in Bold) discourages this and encourages that recommender's use the form.
Thoughts on this? Are the EMBA recommendations simply not as important as the Full-Times?
Should I work closely with my recommender to craft 2000 character stories? Seems as if we would almost have to write poetry or a haiku to tell a story in such a small space!
