"Not Earnest?"

OK, so the jig is kind of up.  Since I cannot get the correct number of letters of recommendation, I will not send any letters of recommendation.  I will send my application without them, assuming that I even can.  But without them (along with my moldy test scores), my app will certainly be rejected.  I just hope they don't summarily reject it before the week is over, and when they do give me my rejection letter, I hope they let me down gently.

However, Stanford actually sent a reply to my questions today.  They were very forthright in saying that any application without recommendations is severely damaged and won't be looked very favorably.  However, if I do send this, my almost certain rejection won't be held against me if I try to apply another time ... at least that is what they said to me.  Furthermore, this scholarship, whereby I can work here in Minnesota and therefore get my MBA education paid off, probably (though they emphasize it's not guaranteed) will be offered in the future.  So I will send this application anyway, just as a trial run, trying to figure out the process of applying for school, and hopefully I will learn lessons from my mistakes and get my crap together the next time -- and I hope there is a next time.

I told the only person who could type up a letter, my boss.  When I broke the news of what's going on with my app, he reacted in a way that ... well, it wasn't hostile, but this is kind of the first time he has said things to me that could even be construed as negative.  He said that writing this recommendation when I will not have the two others it needs to be sent with is a "waste of time," and that's totally true; in fact, if he didn't come around, I wouldn't have brought it up, and I would have been happy if he just forgot about this.

But when he got around to the state of this application I'm going to send as soon as I figure out what to say in this final essay, he said that he does not want to spend time and energy writing something for an application that is, and I quote, "Not earnest."  I kind of pushed back on that.  Not earnest?  I totally want to do this!  My intention of doing the best I can for this application shouldn't be questioned at all!  I just ... didn't know what to do.  It's been more than a quarter-century since I did this applying thing, you know.  And again, this application submission is a trial run; I want to exercise my thought process and organizational rigor this time around so I can do a better job next application season.  That's earnest.  That's totally earnest.

So, I wish he would've been more accurate about the application for which he now will not be attaching a letter of recommendation for.  How about saying he doesn't want to waste his time writing a letter for an app that is ... earnest but half-ass?  That I totally cannot disagree with.