Appropriate Length for Personal Statement

[darren1228]

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For the personal statement section on the VMCAS application the allot a maximum length of 5000 words. I was wondering what would be an appropriate length to write. My friends (who aren't pre-vet students suggests between 1500-2000. I was thinking it would be a better idea to get some advice from students who are in the same boat as I am or maybe even students who are already in vet school. Thanks in advance and good luck to everyone on their application!

 

[chordy4]

wow, they must have changed it this year. i just looked at my personal statement last year, and it was just under 3000 characters and 600 words, so i think the cut off last year was either one of those (though i don't remember exactly), because i remember i was annoyed with trying to edit to fit the length cut-off.

if it's really 5000 words this year, they gave you A LOT more room. i would just use as much space is necessary to explain who you are and why schools should choose you. it's a little hard to say exactly just because that's so much more words than were allowed previously.
last year if we had had more room, i definitely would have used more.

 

[Angelo84]

For the personal statement section on the VMCAS application the allot a maximum length of 5000 words. I was wondering what would be an appropriate length to write. My friends (who aren't pre-vet students suggests between 1500-2000. I was thinking it would be a better idea to get some advice from students who are in the same boat as I am or maybe even students who are already in vet school. Thanks in advance and good luck to everyone on their application!

Double check that. I believe it is 5000 characters. At least it was two years ago and I needed every one of them! Spaces and returns count as characters as well.

 

[CorynnMarie]

Are we certain that spaces count in the 5000 characters? Because I've been trying to figure that out and I can't find anything clear-cut. If that's the case, mine is still too long!

 

[chordy4]

YES SPACES COUNT AS CHARACTERS.

have someone else read your statement or a couple people and see if there are some words that are unnecessary, or two words that could be combined into one shorter word.
trust me, i've cut some 100+ characters out of personal statements etc. multiple times and still managed to maintain my original meaning/point i was trying to get across.

Edit: OH and remember you don't need to double space. if you did, that's something that will easily cut off many characters.

 

[Pomona2006]

Yes - the limit is 5,000 characters INCLUDING spaces. I have already finished my statement and pasted it online.

However, I would highly recommend not exceeding 4,985 characters - especially if you use a program like Word as I've had some difficulty getting my "full" statement copied onto the site. Tech support claims that Word adds characters that aren't "visible." Who knows what the real deal is, but that's my advice from experience.

 

[LucyLoo]

I did about 4800 characters. There is a little counter at the bottom of the space where you enter it so you have an idea what the count is on the app.

 

[VMCAS001]

Hey all - It would be advisable (as many of you have already found out) to NOT type your personal statements in Word as MS has a nasty habit of adding unseen characters to the MS-Word format thus leading to character overages.

The recommended method would be to type directly into the application. However, you can use notepad (or the like) to type your personal statemements and cut and paste.

Hope this helps. Oh, also, the 5000 character count limit IS correct.

 

[meadow36]

I had to keep chopping to make mine fit. I think if you only used 2000 characters (about half of the allotted space) then it would be noticably shorter than the others. Most people I know had to cram it in.

 

[ShelterGirl]

I had to pare mine down several times before it would fit the character limit.

 

[pupsforseeing]

My PS last year was ~595 words, which was way less than this year's 5000 character limit. I added another section to my PS about what's happened in my life the last year to explain why I declined admission last year, but it is still way under the maximum (I think now it's ~4200). I almost felt guilty about not using all of the precious space, but I didn't have anything else that I *had* to get out, and I didn't want to ramble (believe it or not from my posts, when it comes to formal writing, I am extremely succinct and hate wordiness!). Hopefully this year's PS works out as well as last year's 🙂