Should I ask for a general or hospital-specific recommendation letter?

[Slippers]

So on PhORCAS, you can either email your preceptor a request for a general letter of rec that you can upload to each program you apply to. Or, you can ask them for hospital specific letters of recommendation (you email your preceptor a separate request for each program you are applying to).

Which one do you think is better to do? The program-specific letter of recommendation would allow your preceptor to write in "program-specific comments" at the end. But if you are applying to 10 programs, then you would also have to send your preceptor 10 different emails. And this might be time consuming/confusing for your preceptor, which is obviously not a good thing if you want them to write positively about you. The general letter of rec wouldn't have the option for program specific comments at the end. But it requires only one email to your preceptor and probably makes things much easier on their end.

So should I go with the program specific requests or do a general LOR request?

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[inverness2012]

Do a general LOR request. This gives less work on the recommend end and gives you flexibility if you decided to add or remove programs. When I evaluated candidates in the past, we didn't subtract points if we got a Dear Program Director letter or not. There may be an exception if one of your writers has a close connection to a program that you are applying to.

 

[Slippers]

Thank you for your help! I ended up asking my profs which type of letter they preferred... two of them were fine with a general letter and one specifically requested specific letters from each program. I definitely felt much more comfortable requesting their permission before sending an onslaught of emails!