Length of Personal Statement

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sandg

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Does anyone know from experience whether the 5300 hundred character limit for the AMCAS personal statement does or does not include spaces?
Thanks.

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Originally posted by sandg
Does anyone know from experience whether the 5300 hundred character limit for the AMCAS personal statement does or does not include spaces?
Thanks.
I believe it does include spaces. They are really strict on it. They'll just cut you off when you're writing.
 
yeah it includes spaces.

use ms word or something, then have it count up the characters before you paste it into amcas. then paste it into notepad or another "txt" file program to avoid formatting problems.

also, put 2 hard returns at the end of each paragraph. otherwise it will lump them all together.
 
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Originally posted by DoctorKevin
also, put 2 hard returns at the end of each paragraph. otherwise it will lump them all together.
Great. I didn't know that. I thought it was just supposed to be one big lump. Also, quotation marks on msword turn into % or something like that so be careful. My ps had 2 % instead of quotation marks and it was sent like that. I was pretty sad.

I guess it didn't affect me as much but who knows. Maybe some schools may have looked down on it.
 
Originally posted by Slickness
Great. I didn't know that. I thought it was just supposed to be one big lump. Also, quotation marks on msword turn into % or something like that so be careful. My ps had 2 % instead of quotation marks and it was sent like that. I was pretty sad.

I guess it didn't affect me as much but who knows. Maybe some schools may have looked down on it.

that's odd slickness, weren't you on here in may when i was whining about making my PS perfect and fighting with computers?
 
like dockev said...

do it on msword with 5300 characters with spaces...then cut and paste....then go through the essay again on the amcas site and re-enter all the punctuation marks.

and yes...i also did the enter thing between paragraphs so that there was a space between them so that they could have some idea of where something stopped and something began.

i think doing that enter thing took up 2 characters each time you did it in the counter below but that was ok.
 
Originally posted by sandg
Does anyone know from experience whether the 5300 hundred character limit for the AMCAS personal statement does or does not include spaces?
Thanks.

Make sure to paste your word document into NOTEPAD and then do a CHARACTER COUNT before you paste it into the AMCAS application, as MS WORD gives an inaccurate (and UNDERESTIMATES) the number of characters because of the way it stores certain punctuations and indentations.

The last thing you want to do is paste from MSWORD (and YES, all of it will still paste in the AMCAS application window) and hit SUBMIT then find out that its cut off the last paragraph or few sentences of your essay. This ALMOST happened to me, I couldn't figure out why it kept cutting off the last two sentences of my essay whenever I saved it. I would paste it in AMCAS, and it said 5278 CHARACTERS in the window on the AMCAS page, I would save, then reopen and the last two sentences were cut off!! The character count read 5300 then.

Be Cautious!

CCW
 
The easy way to avoid format problems... is to just type it into the AMCAS app, IMO.
 
Where can I find the prompt for the PS on the AMCAS website?
 
yes, and if you do decide to write it on Word or someother word-processor, be sure and check to see if everything 'translates' the same in the AMCAS app......there can be some weird discrepancies such as apostrophies showing up as question marks and other crazy phenomenon that occur when you copy and paste into the app

good luck, and get that sucker done early......its the hardest section of the AMCAS by far. Everything else is just a pain in the butt:horns:
 
there is basically no prompt. try looking for an amcas app instruction book or manual...that might have the exact prompt. maybe i can get it for you from my amcas.

and yes, make sure you paste it into NOTEPAD and edit it before pasting onto the web.
 
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