Should you solicit recommendations from non-school individuals? I think the students should do that but I think you should be very careful who you ask outside of your school building and your thought process should be something like this. This past summer I worked at a camp. The director of the camp and I, we became very close. I think he thinks highly of me, I think he would write me a good letter of recommendation. Okay, that's great, but is that individual going to be able to provide some information in that letter that will not be in either a teacher recommendation letter or the counselor recommendation letter because you can assume that you are going to get those letters? So, now you are talking about bringing in a third source. What is that third source going to bring to that student folder that these other two letters are not going to already have in them? What you don t want to do is have repetition and what you don t want to do is not follow the instructions for that particular college application. So, if the college application asks for two teacher recommendations and one counselor recommendation, that s what you want to do. The idea of introducing a fourth letter into your student file, you want to be very careful about doing that because now you are not following the instructions, so, you want to make sure that that fourth letter, that's going to bring something to that file that s going to be really valuable and you think this could really make a difference here. That s the only time that you want to do something like that. Now, there will be some applications that will actually, ask for a non-teacher recommendation and if that s the case then obviously, you want to go out and get that. So, do that, go get that non-teacher, non-counselor recommendation but be very careful about following the instructions and what that person is going to bring.