>>14417450I used to help make grad school entrance decisions, not only do we read them, they generally trump most everything else you submit.
The order of importance is generally:
1) work experience
2) letters of rec
3) personal letter
4) interesting extra-curricular
5) everything else
As long as you check off some boxes (aka don't have a 2.0 GPA), your grades and what-not don't really matter. Admissions is not about choosing the "best" candidates, it's about choosing who we think are most likely to finish their PhD's so our completion rates stay high. Work experience (internships, etc) are usually really good indicators. Good academics are a dime a dozen and doesn't correlate well with whether you will drop out or not. Letters of Rec show us you can work with someone, and they tell us how that person thinks of you; if you get a good letter of rec from a professor, it's a good sign that you aren't going to just bomb out of grad school. The more personalized, the better, because it tells us that prof actually worked with the student rather than just got a letter request from someone they met like 2 minutes ago. Not having good letters of rec is a red flag, which tells us the person has difficulties making personal connections/doesn't care about working with others which is a red flag.
Remember, we know nothing about the candidate other than a piece of paper. Letters of rec are gold for helping us understand what you actually are like as a candidate.
Personal letters are the tie-breaker than can sway the decision in your direction if you have some weaknesses.
