Personal Statement character count

[Drako]

I am a little slow, but am getting close! Last night, I copied and pasted my personal statement from MS Word into the web application (AMCAS 2002). The document is 5258 characters in Word but AMCAS web application says that it is 5282 characters. That's okay! I am still under the character limit. So I click "Save." The page reloaded and I read my statement from top to bottom. Ugh! The last six words were missing. I stared at the character count box...5246. Eh? So I typed in the missing words, clicked "Save" again...page reloaded, scrolled to bottom of statement...same six words missing...same character count (5246). It is cheating me out of my last six words. I have a hard time saying everything I want to say with that word limit already. Now, this is happening! Did anyone experience this same problem and how did you go about solving it? I would like to avoid re-editing my essay to fit into the new 5246-characters limit. Advice, anything is appreciated! Tks!

Drako

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[figure five]

hey drako

my advice is to pare down your essay...perhaps considerably. That way you'll avoid the character count problem entirely; plus, it's probable that admissions people will only be skimming it for their purposes, so the more concise it is the more powerful it will be.

just my opinion, I guess

 

[Zatoichini]

Here's a tip, that MAY save you characters:
On your word version, it automatically tabs once you push enter. It sucks, cuz when you cut/paste it over, the tab disappears. In order to keep the tab, in your word version, put a space first, then push tab, then type your paragraph. When you cut and paste, the tab will be there along with the space, and you can easily take out the space--giving you a nice tab for each paragraph at the expense of 1 character, not 5 manual spaces acting as a tab. Now you don't need to double enter between paragraphs to separate them.

 

[Drako]

You know, I would love to cut it a little further, but this is the condense version of a 15,000 character document. I just have a lot to say because of what I have been through. My life is quite a story. Thanks for that advice nonetheless. As for the word trick, it is very cool and I appreciate it greatly. I tried it and still, I am limited by that darn 5246-character "bug." This is frustrating as hell! It was sooo painful to condense my essay!

 

[phillybabe]

Happened to me last night. Except mine was a 5270 bug so I guess it wasnt as bad. I just edited a few things and submitted.

 

[lumine]

Just got the same problem except I had some other character count it was limiting me to. Also had some problems with special punctuation like apostrophes turning into escape codes in the text. I was using IE 5.01, so I decided to try some things that helped, might help some of yall or others with this problem:

First I downloaded Netscape and used that. I had my essays in MS Word, so I used save-as to save it as a txt (text only) file. Opened that up with notepad and added the tabs I wanted for indentation. Copied and pasted this into the text areas for the essays and seemed ok. Saving and returning to the application in both netscape and IE left all my text intact. So far so good, there's no weird characters and nothing gets chopped off.

Of course printing it still doesn't show the indents, but that's because it's in HTML (who knows if any readers will actually see the indentation). You can use the extra lines if you prefer as ppl have suggested too.

gluck!