personal statement help

[rkg1000]

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I've written my personal statement, which was one page in Word, and have copied it to ERAS. In ERAS, I printed it out and it came out to be a little over one page. Will the program directors view it the same was that I viewed it? How do I know if need to shorten it? I know that ERAS uses Couriour 10, but I'm not sure about the margins. Thanks for the help.

 

[Renovar]

Courier 10, on average, runs a bit bigger than Times New Roman 10 and Arial 10, so it is unfortunate that what seems 1 page on Word may run over in the real thing. (Last year's apps were printed on Arial 10 but apparently they changed it to Courier this year.)

On a typical setting, such as Arial 10 with 1.0 inch margins all around in Word, a good estimate of a page on ERAS would be ~0.8 pages on Word, or about 45 lines on Word. And yes, I would suspect that the print preview that you see in the ERAS interface would be what the programs will print out, so I would tweek it so that it fits to 1 pages on ERAS.

 

[Asher]

I also agree that you might want to edit the PS so that it is only one page. The advice I've been given re: length is that it should be longer than one page only if it is an extremely well-written, creative, interesting masterpiece -- for most of us mortals, we need to keep it to one page.

Have you had anyone else read it yet? Find a friend who was an English major or an attending you trust the opinions of and see what suggestions they might have on streamlining it.

Good luck!