Personal Statement Formatting

[sikesalt]

I know this has been asked before, however I could not find a definative answer in the other posts. When I paste my essay into the form it looks fine and shows indentations at the beggining of each paragraph. However on the print application screen it just shows one big blob. I called aamc to ask them, but they were absolutely no help. Does anyone know the proper way to format the essay?

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[sikesalt]

Anyone? This is really frustrating!

 

[cather]

This happened to me to and I don't know what to do about it.

 

[kidsmd]

Don't worry. This is how it looks for every one. THe best that you can do to format it, is to put a line between paragraphs. None of your indentations will show. It was like this last year and I guess they still have not changed it.

 

[Cydney Foote]

kidsmd is right -- hit "enter" twice at the end of each paragraph and don't use indents. When you print it out, you should see it formatted correctly.

NOTE: Each "enter" counts as 2 character spaces, so if your essay is 8 paragraphs you'll have 7 breaks between paragraphs (i.e., 14 spaces). If your essay is 5290 characters before counting paragraph breaks, your total character count will be 5304 and the last four characters won't fit.

 

[pocketprotector]

I have seen personal statements where students did nothing to change the formatting (their statements appeared as a blob as well on amcas). In the personal statement received by the schools, the formatting still appeared correctly.

I personally put a double hard return after each paragraph and that's how it looked for the schools--they saw a blank line between paragraphs.

Bottom line: it probably doesn't matter.

 

[medicnas]

!!!! Absolutely make sure you paste it from Word to Notepad (and save it in Notepad as a TXT) before you paste it into the app!!!!!

Their stupid app can't handle rich text (what Word pastes) and it will translate your punctuation into gibberish. The instruction PDF gives this only slight mention, but it really is a big problem. Just do all of your editing in Word, but paste it into Notepad and then paste from Notepad into your browser window before submitting. This way you'll be sure to paste only Unicode text.

Good luck!