Longest essays in secondaries

[Mccarey]

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Hey, just curious....which schools have essays to write, and which ones are the longest? So far, U of connecticut, john hopkins and baylor have the most essay writing for me. I hate the ones that just ask for money.

 

[Mccarey]

Yeah, I heard Pritzker's essays are pretty long, even though I didnt' apply there.

 

[PianoGirl04]

Originally posted by Mccarey
Hey, just curious....which schools have essays to write, and which ones are the longest? So far, U of connecticut, john hopkins and baylor have the most essay writing for me. I hate the ones that just ask for money.

Hehe...I love the ones that just ask for money...so easy to just write a check instead of an essay!

I got lucky with secondaries, as I didn't apply to any schools with horrible amounts of essays (except maybe UCSD, which I heard makes you write an autobiography, but I haven't gotten their secondary yet). Stanford was pretty tough because the typical "diversity in your background" essay is mandatory, and I'm just a plain old middle class white chick. But it was limited to 25 lines, so it was pretty short. I heard Chicago and UCLA were pretty rough...

 

[dmitrinyr]

I thought that Albany Medical College's essay was pretty difficult. Not that it was long, but that they set a very specific number of characters that you had to do it within.
So, you had to "describe yourself" in 1000 characters. This is approximately 2 paragraphs. I found it very hard to make this essay sound sophisticated and intelligent in any way in only 2 paragraphs. Also, it was actually about 970 characters because for some reason they counted the new paragraphs as 5 or 10 characters and when I would check the word count on Word, it would be ok.

Anyway, I had trouble with the essays that had specific limits. It's not as hard to write an essay when they tell you to limit yourself to a page. Still, I hate writting essays. Especially ones that are as important as these ones. I love secondaries that just ask for your money. God bless them, I say. Those schools realize full well that we have better things to do like waiting everyday for the mailman to arrive😀 .

Well, good luck to all.

dmitri

 

[robotdancing]

case western's "tell us about something that interests you outside of medicine in two pages or less" essay has the potential to be pretty long; mine was about 1.5 pages, single-spaced.

northwestern and loyola require a pretty decent chunk of writing, too.

 

[Arista.MD]

Add Davis to the list with about 9 essays,
three for the first part, and 6 the second part of the application ( 1500 characters each)

 

[Robz]

I thought descirbe yourself in 1000 characters or less was one of my toughest essays. I decided to make my Albany essay short sweet and to the point. I think it ended up around 300-500 characters 🙂

 

[Catalyst]

I'm still stumped on this profession question for maryland, my state school

 

[SarahGM]

DUKE!!!!

 

[Mccarey]

Although the hopkins one was not difficult, it asked for12 extracurricular activies and 2 short essays, their spacing limit drove me insane!! I couldn't fit anything in. In the space for position, I couldn't even get the name of my position in.

 

[Northerner]

Speaking of space limits...anyone a little frustrated with Drexel's format for the secondary? Tiny boxes for some things that require a little more than an inch of space. Especially considering the form was their own special one they send out by mail, you know, one you can't really do on a computer, it's pretty much either handwrite or typewriter. I don't know about you all, but finding a public typewriter on campus these days isn't exactly easy...such is life.

 

[Sonya]

baylor wasn't bad at all.

JHU is kindof bad, pritzker is bad, duke is bad and loyolar is real bad. actuall, loyola is more intimidating then bad, since a lot of the SIX question are pretty easy to answer.

and who ever asks for autobios, eg UCSD is bad.


sonya

 

[Amy B]

I just hope that all our work is really getting noticed. Do you ever get the feeling that we are writing all this stuff and nobody is going to take the time to read it?

 

[dmitrinyr]

I highly doubt that each school reads every essay. Take loyola for example. They get about 10,000 applications per year. They ask something like 12 short answer questions. That is 120,000 total questions. My guess is that they only read the essays of the applicants that they feel have good enough numbers. With University of Chicago, I guess they just want you to suffer. They ask for 6 long essays. There is no chance in hell that an admissions committee member who goes through about 30-40 applications a day has the time or the will power to go through 150-200 essays. I say at best they take about 2 minutes per essay per student. That means that at best they just skim through something that we all put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into. Well, it is just the game that we have chosen.

good luck to all and have fun writting the essays.

dmitri

 

[killakiran]

I didn't think Duke's was that bad. Any essay that basically asks "Why are you applying here?" is rough for me.

 

[PianoGirl04]

I just got some love from UCSD the other day...and of course, the autobio essay is on there. However...they instruct us not to exceed the space provided (2 pages), but they only provide 1 page. Here are the exact instructions:

DO NOT EXCEED THE SPACE PROVIDED FOR THIS PURPOSE (no more than two pages long) Use a font size or pitch which is easily readable. Type your essay below:

...and then they only leave 1 page. Of course, since it's a Word document, you can expand it into 2 pages, but the PDF version only leaves 1 page as well. Do they mean that 2 pages double-spaced would fit into one page single-spaced? Should we even type it single-spaced? I'm starting to think I don't really want to go to UCSD...🙄