Personal statement length in characters

[piggaloo]

Dear all,

I have two versions of my personal statement, one long and the other shorter, although I don't know if even the shorter version is short enough. They are roughly 7,800 and 5,800 characters in length, respectively. The short version fits snugly on one page in size 10 Times New Roman typeface, with 1-inch top and bottom margins and 1.1-inch side margins. I've heard from many people that interviewers (even PDs) won't look at your PS if it's longer than one page. But how many characters is that exactly? ERAS allows up to 28,000 characters, but that's 5 pages using my slim margins and small font and size. Before I spend the time to cut and edit some more, can anyone give me an idea how many characters I should shoot for, or if there's a standard format residency programs use to print these documents after downloading them from ERAS?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[Nerdoscience]

Still too long. I would say 4500 characters is a good absolute max. I have read personal statements as part of the process from th flip side, and the ones longer than that are too boring to finish. Good ones vary in length a lot between barely 2/3 of a page and a packed full page -- 1.5 to double spaced.

 

[GopherBrain]

MS Word counts my old personal statement at 3261 characters with spaces, 2713 without.

 

[melmc]

Should we plan on having 2 different versions of our personal statement - one for prelim positions and one for the neuro programs, or is it ok to use the same one for both?

 

[typhoonegator]

I slightly modified my personal statement for the prelim application so it would be a bit more applicable. I thought it was weird to keep droning on about neurology when I knew it would be some IM dude reading the app. So I changed one anecdote slightly to emphasize the importance of medicine in neurologic care, and stuck in little comments about how I wanted a career in neurology, with a strong background in IM.

Seemed to do the trick, for me at least.

 

[buckley]

thanks for the q and the a's! I have about 4307 characters--whoops! I guess I have to work on trimming it down...fits on 1 page though
I have a q: I use an apostrophe ('s) and when I paste it to Eras it becomes a weird symbol like a reverse question mark. Is there a way to by-pass this?

Haven't even worked on my IM statement, but Im thinking of using the same and just adding a line or two about the importance of a good internship year. I think it's good to let the programs know you're really into neuro because i think that of all the programs requiring a prelim, neuro is the closest to IM. But that's just my opinion.

 

[piggaloo]

Thank you all for your informative replies. About the apostrophe question, I think you may have your word processor preferences set to fancy or curly quotes. You can either change this preference to standard quotes, or correct the inverted question marks one by one in ERAS by deleting them and hitting your apostrophe button.

I have a somewhat related question. Does ERAS not recognize your garden variety question mark? Somewhere in my PS, I pose a question and punctuate it with a question mark, but ERAS doesn't seem to know what I'm talking about. Anyone else have the same problem?