PS Disaster!!!

[citarita]

Help!!!

I uploaded my personal statement a long time ago, printed everything out and double-checked it to make sure it looked fine and followed all directions from ERAS about the statement perfectly. Yesterday, one one of my interviews, the program director showed me a copy of my personal statement and it had many crazy punctuations (like upside-down ? marks) inserted, and was questioning if I could spell or not. It was not like this after I submitted it. Please help. The coordinator printed out another copy and it still had these errors. I can't have this personal statement like this for my next interviews.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[medpedshopeful]

The ERAS website has instructions on how to cut & paste your PS into ERAS from Word in order avoid this. Apparently word has characters that the ERAS program cannot read hence the upside down question marks. On the personal statement site of the ERAS application there is a link for instructions on how to post it without getting these marks - you have to save it as a text file which will create a notepad file and then you cut & paste from that. When you save your PS it allows you to see it and it will show you the upside down question marks in red if there are any characters that it cannot read so you can correct it before assigning it to each program.
Good luck.

 

[faithnotsight]

Citarita,

The problem is that chances are all of the places you applied to likely have already downloaded and printed this personal statement. You can correct it, but most places have already seen it. So, hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the damage is already done. It is just like people discover typos late in the game. The ERAS program tells you how to get rid of this and I am not sure how you missed it. If I were you, I would rely on phone calls from my school to support how great a candidate you are, so others don't toss you out saying, "she is not even literate." All hope is not lost, but this is hard to recover from.

Help!!!

I uploaded my personal statement a long time ago, printed everything out and double-checked it to make sure it looked fine and followed all directions from ERAS about the statement perfectly. Yesterday, one one of my interviews, the program director showed me a copy of my personal statement and it had many crazy punctuations (like upside-down ? marks) inserted, and was questioning if I could spell or not. It was not like this after I submitted it. Please help. The coordinator printed out another copy and it still had these errors. I can't have this personal statement like this for my next interviews.

 

[Faebinder]

Help!!!

I uploaded my personal statement a long time ago, printed everything out and double-checked it to make sure it looked fine and followed all directions from ERAS about the statement perfectly. Yesterday, one one of my interviews, the program director showed me a copy of my personal statement and it had many crazy punctuations (like upside-down ? marks) inserted, and was questioning if I could spell or not. It was not like this after I submitted it. Please help. The coordinator printed out another copy and it still had these errors. I can't have this personal statement like this for my next interviews.

I think a lot of programs have gotten used to this by now and will ignore it... dont panic... remake the personal statement. Unassign the old one, reassign the new one you remade... If they feel like printing your PS again, then they will print the corrected one... otherwise the damage (though I doubt any happened) is probably unreversible. Do you really think a program will reject you based on an upside down question mark? They got plenty of other reasons, have no fear there.

 

[Entei]

They've already seen whatever errors there are, so the damage is done. I think the extent of the "damage" varies from program to program. This is a known issue with ERAS, and I think it happens to a lot of people.

There was a similar post about this issue made a few weeks ago, and this is what "aprogdirector" had to say about it:

ERAS clearly has some formatting / spacing issues with it, and I never hold applicants responsible for these. This is especially true in the personal statements. Many people write their PS's in Microsoft word, and then copy and paste them into ERAS (or so I would assume). Unfortunately, MS Word includes many formatting codes and other special characters, which do not translate into ERAS. The classic example of this is the "curly quotes" -- MS Word usually replaces the usual striaght quotes with curly ones, and ERAS ends up replacing these with some other nonsensical character. I ignore all of this stuff.

 

[EastCoast]

although it sucks that it happened...ii agree with the others who said there are plenty of others who have their personal statement print out that way. don't worry about it and focus on rocking your interviews!

 

[fang]

Help!!!

I uploaded my personal statement a long time ago, printed everything out and double-checked it to make sure it looked fine and followed all directions from ERAS about the statement perfectly. Yesterday, one one of my interviews, the program director showed me a copy of my personal statement and it had many crazy punctuations (like upside-down ? marks) inserted, and was questioning if I could spell or not. It was not like this after I submitted it. Please help. The coordinator printed out another copy and it still had these errors. I can't have this personal statement like this for my next interviews.

Don't panic!! Just fix your PS and re-upload it-- that's the best constructive thing you can do now. Also, bring a copy of the current verson and give it to your interviewers. Breifly explain that you didn't cut and paste into ERAS correctly, but have fixed the problem now and would like them to have an updated copy. Who knows, maybe you can score a few professionalism points by handling a mistake elegantly??

 

[Vaderize]

Mine did the same thing even after cutting and pasting.

I doubt it's a huge deal; that's a silly reason to be cost an interview, in my humble opinion.

On another note, I just realized that on the day I certified my CAF, when using the autoscroll feature on my mouse, I believe I inadvertently changed the years of my prior residency training from "7/2004" to "7/2003"-which overlaps with both my internship and graduation from medical school.

I panicked like mad when I saw this, but my sister told me to chill out and that the listed length of my training made the mistake obvious and that most people would probably be able to figure it out.

It still makes me worry that this would cost me an interview or a match, though.

 

[Faebinder]

I find it very crappy that the CAF cannot be changed.

Publication updates, Certification, Change of Status... all kinds of things can change within the period of 6 month from Sept to March. Not to mention input errors.