Can our dept staff (or university letter service) upload all my letters? How to set up reference letter proxy?

We have an office staff who handles all reference letters. Is there a way to have the office staff upload my letters?

There are 2 ways to do this:

#1. You enter all your faculty letter writers, each with a different and unique email address, in your standard coversheet page. [If a staff is only responsible for uploading one reference writer's letters, you can just use that staff's email address, instead of the writer's actual email, and the writer's name in the reference entry, and skip this FAQ.] The letter writers can designate the same office staff to be their proxy and then the office staff will receive all letter requests and can upload letters on their behalf.

To do that, the writers have to login to enter the office staff's email as their proxy. It's really easy for them to do; just login and click on the 'proxy' link near the bottom. They only need to do this once and the proxy works for all applicants they may have. Or the staff person can request to be added as a proxy for a faculty member by clicking on the 'Add as a proxy?' link on the reference login page.

If the faculty member doesn't want to add the staff person as his/her proxy, he can simply forward the reference request emails to the staff person, and the staff person can click on the links in the emails to upload the requested letters.

#2. If you really don't want to bother your writers directly (or you are dealing with a letter service), you need to enter the office staff's name and email, as a new reference entry, in your standard coversheet page only once, AND check the "must check here if the person above will upload letters on behalf of multiple writers:" checkbox. To email the login info to the staff person, check the "email notify writer on submit?" checkbox and submit. Using this option, there is no need to enter each actual faculty reference writers on your coversheet at all; only one entry for the staff person is sufficient. It's really important that you check the checkbox.

Then this staff person can login and post all your letters (by clicking on your name on the Refs or Proxies list). It's good idea to tell the person to enter the writer's full name in the upload form. If multiple letters have been scanned into a single file, the staff person MUST enter all the writers' names and separate them by semicolons(;). The last point is important so your letters will be counted properly. Please note the staff person's name and email will be listed on your job applications, but the real writer's name will be displayed after each letter uploaded. *** Note to the staff person: if the letters you are asked to upload are generic in their contents, please upload them as generic letters (i.e., not select any employers on the uploading form). That way you only need to upload the same letters once. It's also a good idea to enter an appropriate 'Entry Name' for the letter and have the "allow applicant to see the Entry Name" box checked, to make it easy for the applicants to select the right letters on their application forms. ***

Note to method #2: if you (the applicant) forgot to check the "must check here if the person above will upload letters on behalf of multiple writers" box on your coversheet form and the staff has already uploaded the letters, you'll find that system doesn't count your letters correctly on your Status page, since there is no way for the system to tell whom the actual writer is for each of the letters. To fix it, please check that box on your coversheet form for that staff and submit, *then* ask the staff person to login and click on the 1st link for each of the letters to enter the actual writer's name, check the box "keep the original uploading date unchanged", and submit.

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Method #1 is preferred, and #2 is widely used too (but hey, sometimes you have to do what you have to do:-)

2007/11/01 23:34:32