Recently submitted ERAS on the 26th with 3 LORs (2 IM, 1 FM) and applied to around ~75 programs. About 10-15 of them explicitly mention the chair letter as a requirement. At my school, we don't have a chair of medicine to write the letters so we typically seek them out from our rotations. I had spoken to the chair where I did my IM rotation about 5 months ago and had constantly emailed/gone in-person to request the letter since then and they had pretty much promised to have it in on time. Unfortunately, they haven't uploaded it yet and now I'm feeling like I might be screwed. Apparently, they had told another student that they planned to upload all of the letters in mid-October. My question is, how much of a problem will this be going forward in terms of interviews? Do the programs that don't specifically request chair letters still expect to see them? Is mid-October too late for the chair letter even if the rest of my application is complete? I have no red flags that I know about. Thanks for your help.
Late IM Chair Letter
- Thread starter Tree1996
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Looking at your post history, you're a DO. DO school chair letters are useless. Programs will not care about them
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Is this generally true for all specialties?
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Good point. I can only comment about IM.
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No.
Depends on the program. If it's one that expects a chair letter than likely it would be too late or you will be at the bottom of the barrel for review since programs start sending out interviews in October.
It is absolutely a brutal disservice that a huge chunk of DO schools do not offer a letter that is required to apply to programs and the only reason that happens is because these standalone DO's lack true clinical departments and/or actually integrity to establish a true academic clinical department because the nearest rotating hospital is 200 miles away.
