Weird AMCAS formatting

[Jaigantic]

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I submitted my primary already and now, upon reviewing the entries for my activities, I'm seeing some crazy weird formatting problems. A few times, I pressed "enter" to create a new paragraph and I realize now that that doesn't work and the text will just come together again. However, that isn't the main problem. One of my entries has random spaces in the middle of words where I am positive I didn't put them and several of my entries also has a random string of characters. For example, one of them looks like this: ";Honors College: Contact: Jane Doe E mail&# x3a;[email protected]". When entering my description, I know I didn't put in that semicolon in the beginning or that random space in "Email" and I definitely didn't write the "&# x3a" which even shows up in other entries almost identically. There's no pattern to it either; sometimes that &# x3a shows up after I press enter to create a new paragraph, sometimes after a colon. I didn't even copy and paste that excerpt from word or anything, I wrote it directly into the description box on AMCAS.

I know some of you are going to say I might have made some of those mistakes on my own, such as the semicolon and random spaces but I KNOW I didn't since they show up in multiple places and some things I DID copy and paste from word and I can see from my saved copy that those mistakes aren't there.

Is there any way I can resolve this? When you look at some of the descriptions as a whole they look awful; as though a 5th grader who just learned about punctuation marks wrote it. I'm going to call AAMC tomorrow but I'm almost positive they're going to say there's nothing they can do. What do you all think?

 

[Daenerys Targaryen]

Try pasting your descriptions into a plain text editor and then copying them again out of that before pasting into AMCAS. That resolved those types of issues for me.

 

[Jaigantic]

Try pasting your descriptions into a plain text editor and then copying them again out of that before pasting into AMCAS. That resolved those types of issues for me.

I already submitted but even so, most of the ones with these mistakes are ones that I typed directly into AMCAS without copying and pasting from anywhere else so there shouldn't be any mistakes at all.

 

[Daenerys Targaryen]

I already submitted but even so, most of the ones with these mistakes are ones that I typed directly into AMCAS without copying and pasting from anywhere else so there shouldn't be any mistakes at all.

Oh sorry, didn't notice that you said you already submitted. I wouldn't worry about it. Sometimes errors that you see when you look at your whole app are not there when you look at the PDF version. Errors like that happen all the time, and nobody will think anything of it! 🙂

 

[jesie]

The spacing stuff is just an issue that comes up in the viewer. Happened to mine too, so it's not about how you entered it. I bet the other one just has to do with a bad ASCII translation from their module. I wouldn't sweat this.

 

[Jaigantic]

Oh sorry, didn't notice that you said you already submitted. I wouldn't worry about it. Sometimes errors that you see when you look at your whole app are not there when you look at the PDF version. Errors like that happen all the time, and nobody will think anything of it! 🙂

The spacing stuff is just an issue that comes up in the viewer. Happened to mine too, so it's not about how you entered it. I bet the other one just has to do with a bad ASCII translation from their module. I wouldn't sweat this.

Appreciate it, guys!

 

[efle]

I might call and ask that they email you a pdf of your application from their end. Have to make sure the med schools aren't going to see the random characters (though for the ones that view it as HTML, the returns will indeed be lost)

 

[Catalystik]

I submitted my primary already and now, upon reviewing the entries for my activities, I'm seeing some crazy weird formatting problems. A few times, I pressed "enter" to create a new paragraph and I realize now that that doesn't work and the text will just come together again. However, that isn't the main problem. One of my entries has random spaces in the middle of words where I am positive I didn't put them and several of my entries also has a random string of characters. For example, one of them looks like this: ";Honors College: Contact: Jane Doe E mail&# x3a;[email protected]". When entering my description, I know I didn't put in that semicolon in the beginning or that random space in "Email" and I definitely didn't write the "&# x3a" which even shows up in other entries almost identically. There's no pattern to it either; sometimes that &# x3a shows up after I press enter to create a new paragraph, sometimes after a colon. I didn't even copy and paste that excerpt from word or anything, I wrote it directly into the description box on AMCAS.

I know some of you are going to say I might have made some of those mistakes on my own, such as the semicolon and random spaces but I KNOW I didn't since they show up in multiple places and some things I DID copy and paste from word and I can see from my saved copy that those mistakes aren't there.

Is there any way I can resolve this? When you look at some of the descriptions as a whole they look awful; as though a 5th grader who just learned about punctuation marks wrote it. I'm going to call AAMC tomorrow but I'm almost positive they're going to say there's nothing they can do. What do you all think?

You may be viewing your application from the wrong location. Do not look at the Summary View. Instead, go to the Main Menu on the first page of the application, click Print on the right side, and select PDF view (not html) . That is how adcomms will see it.

 

[Jaigantic]

You may be viewing your application from the wrong location. Do not look at the Summary View. Instead, go to the Main Menu on the first page of the application, click Print on the right side, and select PDF view (not html) . That is how adcomms will see it.

Yep, this was the case. Thank you! Mini-heart attack has subsided. 🙂

 

[Catalystik]

Yep, this was the case. Thank you! Mini-heart attack has subsided. 🙂

Another life saved! 😉

 

[DSM_302.0]

Can i assume that adcoms will see my application as I see it in PDF?

 

[Lardy Boy]

Can i assume that adcoms will see my application as I see it in PDF?

Others have mention that they do!



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