Is my Personal Statement long enough?

[Bored_Conscious]

---

Members don't see this ad.

I have spent a good 3 months writing my personal statement. Rewriting it completely around 6 times and I finally got a draft that I was extremely pleased with. After leaving it to hang a few weeks, I came back to it and had a few friends read over it and make edits. After making all the edits, making it more succinct, etc. the final character count came out to be a little over 4300 characters. It was initially around 4900 characters, with max-character count at 5000 (TMDSAS).

My message is still clear, succinct, has a good theme, etc. and was worried that a 700 character deficit would be looked down upon.

 

[Warder]

Totally fine. Admissions members likely have to read hundreds of these. As long as you have a complete, cohesive story that hits all the points you want/need to, you're good.

Quality > Quantity.

EDIT: As an n=1, I gave ~200 word responses to some secondary questions for a school that gave limits of ~500 words and still got an interview there. For another, I gave like 3-4 sentence answer for a 2,000 or 2,500 character response and also got an interview there. In both cases, I was able to convey the points I wanted quickly and compactly. Given that I got interviews, they also felt the answers were adequate.

 

[lumya]

I'm a huge believer that being succinct is better than rambling.

But is there really nothing else you want to mention with those 700 characters?

I ended up with only 3 characters to spare on my personal statement and I still felt that I could have added more without entering the rambling territory.

 

[Catalystik]

I have spent a good 3 months writing my personal statement. Rewriting it completely around 6 times and I finally got a draft that I was extremely pleased with. After leaving it to hang a few weeks, I came back to it and had a few friends read over it and make edits. After making all the edits, making it more succinct, etc. the final character count came out to be a little over 4300 characters. It was initially around 4900 characters, with max-character count at 5000 (TMDSAS).

My message is still clear, succinct, has a good theme, etc. and was worried that a 700 character deficit would be looked down upon.

Yes, your Personal Statement is long enough. It will not be looked down upon for using ~4300 characters.

 

[Bored_Conscious]

I'm a huge believer that being succinct is better than rambling.

But is there really nothing else you want to mention with those 700 characters?

I ended up with only 3 characters to spare on my personal statement and I still felt that I could have added more without entering the rambling territory.

I will come back to it later on. But for now, I do not think so.