<p>I pasted my personal statements into the essay boxes and submitted my application. Sadly, after the fact, I looked at them and saw some strange characters where there should be quotation marks.</p>
<p>Instead of "word," for example, a??word.a?? would happen. Notice that the quotation marks are completely gone.</p>
<p>I've heard of this happening to others before....but it's too late to edit this part of my application. Will I be fine? Will the admissions officers know what's going on there? Or will I have to call the application office on Monday to talk to them about this? Thanks in advance.</p>
<p>Aha! You didn’t edit your format. Did you save your Word document as .txt? You should’ve then you will copy and paste into the application. However, you should click on the “View Printable Application” section and see if there were any problems like a??word??</p>
<p>I had to make similar edits. But why didn’t you look back to your personal statement? The instructions said to make sure that certain symbols (??word??) do not appear.</p>
<p>Apparently, it didn’t work for some reason. I suppose I should’ve proofread it better. What do you think I should do? Is it serious enough to warrant calling the application office on Monday? Or could I just leave as is since this problem is very common and they’ll probably expect to see this in some applicants’ personal statements?</p>
<p>I actually think it’s seen as a common problem - but, how many weird symbols did you see? If it was like one or two then that’s fine…but if it was more than seven then we have a problem.</p>
<p>There were like three instances of that happening, and all in the response to the second prompt about a personal quality, talent, etc. that it’s important to you. It doesn’t really obstruct the message I’m trying to convey to the admissions officers in my opinion; it just looks weird. I typed a shorter response to the second prompt(About 280 words. My other response was 640.) if that means anything.</p>
<p>I doubt it’s going to be a big deal at all honestly. It’s laughable that they couldn’t put together a better format for the personal statements.</p>
<p>The worst conclusion they would make is that you didn’t do (although you did) what they recommend (save as .txt, etc …) and you didn’t review the application before submitting. They may see you as rushing and careless. However they might just call it a common mistake and ignore it. </p>
<p>It’s kind of ridiculous when the prestigious University of California with thousands of computer majors can’t find a way to turn “ ” and into " ".</p>
<p>A bunch of HS kids applying were complaining about the same thing. The UC’s should really fix that for next cycle because it’s kinda ridiculous. It’s 2013 for crying out loud…</p>
<p>Same thing happened to my statements when I copied and pasted them into the app. Luckily, I reread them before submitting and changed all the random ?s and other markings. Something tells me this is a really common thing and shouldn’t hold it against any applicant.</p>