Apply MY Self

'Tis the season...

...to write dozens of recommendation letters.

And, may I say, to the graduate program administrators around the country; the commercial on-line application services universally suck.
Having to enter and re-enter the same information about myself, as a recommender, on poorly designed piece of crap websites is a waste of my time and a source of enormous irritation.

If this continues I will start boycotting electronic grad school application services and send good old fashioned paper letters directly to the departments.
I expect someone will then have to scan them (into TIFF files no doubt) and enter the data by hand, but it won't be me, and I won't have to do it over and over and over again.

You have staff, I do not. Start being helpful rather than using your resources to offload the work onto people doing you a favour for free.

PS: if you are a US graduate school, then make sure the first entry on the "dropdown select country" menu is the United States, not Afghanistan [sic] - I know there are a lot of foreign applicants, but the majority are still from the US with recommenders in the US, and having to scroll through 157 countries to get to the United States is particularly annoying.

Phhhbbbtttt!!!

PS: Damn! I just did a bunch of forms and dated them all Jan '06...
that should melt some admin functionality somewhere.
Ah well, should provide a good filter somewhere along the way. Happens.