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Personal Statement Length


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Hello everyone. I had a quick question about the length of the CASPA personal statement.

 

I have read through the FAQ and I did see where they say you have a 5000 character limit in your PS. I have typed my PS and it is right at 5100 including spaces (I know I need to shorten it just a bit) and it looks dramatically longer than many of the other personal statements that I have seen here. In fact, it exceeds 800 words.

 

I am wondering if I am missing something, if other people's personal statements are just short, or if MS Word is calculating my character count in a dramatically different manner than CASPA will calculate it. I can not imagine there would be that big of a discrepancy.

 

Does anyone who has actually submitted their PS have any insight into this?

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The directions in CASPA say that you cannot go by MS word's character count- that it does not line up with theirs. You can cut and paste and it will seem to fit, but then it will cut it off before the end if it is too long (at least according to CASPA). Caspa says to use the character count in notepad or type it directly into the application box and they will keep a count for you. That is what I chose to do, and they were right- it did not match up with my Word document count.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks tao, I was wondering what the approximate word count was. I saw on the CASPA website everything that others had pointed out, however just wanted some feedback from someone who had actually submitted to get a better feel for about how many words and characters fit.

 

I would hate to go through the work of trimming an essay only to find that I was still terribly long on the word count, and end up starting from scratch because my general concept just could not be shortened.

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  • 1 month later...

I had a question pertaining to PS length. Although we are given 5000 characters, is it best to keep it concise? I mean adcoms are reading so many PS's but just because of that...should I sacrifice a few sentences? I'm not sure what to do about the length...my PS is right at 5000 and although I could take some stuff out...I wonder if that would be detrimental. Thoughts please?

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I had a question pertaining to PS length. Although we are given 5000 characters, is it best to keep it concise? I mean adcoms are reading so many PS's but just because of that...should I sacrifice a few sentences? I'm not sure what to do about the length...my PS is right at 5000 and although I could take some stuff out...I wonder if that would be detrimental. Thoughts please?

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I tried using notepad as suggested, but I can't find how to get it to show me the character count, so I just typed in right into CASPA since you can save it there. I don't think it cuts it off as far as what YOU can see, but when the adcoms get it, they will be missing anything over the 5000.

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I tried using notepad as suggested, but I can't find how to get it to show me the character count, so I just typed in right into CASPA since you can save it there. I don't think it cuts it off as far as what YOU can see, but when the adcoms get it, they will be missing anything over the 5000.

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You can paste it into CASPA, and then just type a letter and it will give you the character count up until that point. I found that the count using MS word, however, was pretty similar to CASPA, maybe over by 50 characters max. I also had a statement right around the 5000 character mark, and it was much more than 625 words.

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You can paste it into CASPA, and then just type a letter and it will give you the character count up until that point. I found that the count using MS word, however, was pretty similar to CASPA, maybe over by 50 characters max. I also had a statement right around the 5000 character mark, and it was much more than 625 words.

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