<p>So I'm working on my Jefferson Scholarship application, but my personal essay is about 550 words. The prompt asks you to "Please limit your response to 500 words," but I am able to save my too-long essay without a problem. My question is, would they care if my essay exceeds the limit (or is it a recommendation)? I don't want to have to cut things out of it to make it under 500 words, because IMHO it's a great essay, but at the same time I don't want to seem like I'm blatantly disregarding the length requirement. Any opinions on this? Or am I over-analyzing the situation?</p>
<p>I don’t have time to count words. The point of the word count recommendation is to keep you from thinking you have to write a term paper.</p>
<p>I don’t know if that’s true of the Jefferson Scholars folks, but I have to imagine that 50 words isn’t a big deal to them, either.</p>