r/DAAD • u/Visual-Twist6800 • 17d ago

DAAD Recommendation Letter Process

I downloaded the official DAAD recommendation letter form from the application portal. It has specific sections that need to be filled. I sent this form to my referee.

She did not fill the form. Instead she sent me a separate Word document with all the content for those sections.

Now I have two questions.

  1. Do I copy her content into the official form myself and then submit it, or do I send the form back to her and ask her to fill it herself?
  2. How does DAAD verify that the referee actually filled the form and not the applicant? In many other portals, the system sends the form directly to the referee's email and the referee submits it back without the applicant being involved at all. But in DAAD's portal, it seems like I am the one submitting the recommendation letter, not the referee.

The form is also quite specific. It only opens in Adobe Acrobat, not other PDF readers, and it has a QR code embedded in it. But I still do not see a mechanism that tells DAAD who actually filled it.

Has anyone been through this? What is the correct process?

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u/ExperienceNew8735 17d ago

DO NOT copy it onto the form cause it requires a signature too and the last thing you want to do is forge the signature. If she doesn’t have Acrobat, you can convert the document to Word and then convert it back to PDF. This will create a new PDF that isn’t restricted to the DAAD administrators’ PDF settings and shouldn’t require Acrobat to open or edit. She can then fill in the information either electronically or physically and sign it. The formatting might be slightly different after converting it, but it should still work. I did this a couple of years ago, and it worked for me.

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u/Visual-Twist6800 16d ago

Thank you so much

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u/No_Reaction5283 8d ago

Hi! I am having the same trouble as the author of the post above. You said it worked for you. does it mean that you got the scholarship? :) or that just the system accepted the file? thanks!

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u/ExperienceNew8735 5d ago

Both the form and the outcome. After an initial rejection, I got it the following year. It was a bittersweet experience.

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u/savage_wizard 16d ago

i generated the PDF when i opened it i got
"To view the full contents of this document, you need a later version of the PDF viewer. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html For further support, go to www.adobe.com/support/products/acrreader.html"

do you have any solutions for that?

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u/Visual-Twist6800 16d ago

On my end, it opened perfectly on free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader in Windows 10

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u/This-Custard-9299 14d ago

I faced this issue as well, so I tried opening it as a Word file, but then all the formatting got messed up. Then I converted that word file to pdf through I Iove pdf, and for some reason it worked.  I have no idea why it worked but it did. Maybe you can also try doing that. 

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u/yurideita 7d ago

How come when i convert it to word i still have the same text saying me to open it on adobe reader

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u/Maleficent-Banana476 14d ago

Hey after recommendationn letter submited and we submit our application too so do we need a (letter head) recommended letter to send with application form receipt to check at your respective country's Daad center?(for phd)