Length of AMCAS/AACOMAS essay

[DD214_DOC]

What is the maximum and average lengths of the essays? I'm a pretty good writer, but not very good at getting everything across in a short space. My original essay was up to 8 pages before I scratched it and started with a better idea.

Thanks.

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[Lil IceBoy]

I think for AMCAS the essay length is about 5300 characters with spaces.

 

[Allygator89]

The ACOMAS essay is significantly shorter.

If you were to do it in Word, it would take (on average) the front of one page, and just a tiny bit on the next page.

If you were to do your essay for ACOMAS, chop it down. I did both, and my ACOMAS one had a lot less to it to fit it in the space alloted.

5300 characters isn't a lot, and this includes hard returns =2, and spaces count as well.

Oh, and what MS Word will tell you will be less than you actually have. Keep that in mind. The character counts may be different.

 

[AverageMan]

8 Pages? Editing that must have been rough. I got my AMCAS essay in at the exact maximum of 5300 characters, and that was a page and a quarter of single spaced text in Word. Very impressive if you managed it

 

[The White Coat Investor]

No shorter than 1/2 page. No longer than 1 page. Trust me....I read 200 of them this year, and I didn't turn a page. (There was occasionally a page to turn, but I DIDN'T TURN A PAGE.) If you're not interesting in 1 page, you're not interesting in 8.

 

[koma]

Originally posted by Desperado
No shorter than 1/2 page. No longer than 1 page. Trust me....I read 200 of them this year, and I didn't turn a page. (There was occasionally a page to turn, but I DIDN'T TURN A PAGE.) If you're not interesting in 1 page, you're not interesting in 8.

In other words, if you want to impress desperado, you better chop it off to 5000 characters. Out of curiosity, do they assign people to be on admission commitees or is this something you volunteer to do? And do these $70 application fees go to Christmas bonuses, or is this just a dirty rumor?

 

[brats800]

*wouldn't want to read 200 essays even for a nice christmas bonus*