I had spent days crafting what I believed to be four excellent essays for the application to my dream school (which, while not Ivy League, is fairly prestigious.) About a week ago, out of pure curiosity, I went back to check my Common App after I had submitted it in late September. To my horror, I discovered that in two of the essays, there were 3 errors, albeit minor. For instance, I omitted the article “an” before a noun. In another, I wrote “possible” instead of “possibly.”
I have been in a panic ever since - the fear that this 3 small mistakes might cost me admission to a school I have been working towards for years now (as I am a transfer student) has lost me a bit of sleep. Will these mistakes come back to haunt me or am I making much ado about nothing? Has anyone had any experience with making errors in their application and still received admission to a high ranking school? HELP ME, PLEASE!
If schools refused to admit anyone who submitted essays with typos in them, their classrooms would be empty. So long as the error isn’t something like “I’ve always wanted to attend Columbia” when the essay has been submited to Brown, you should be fine.
Chill. Read the “clam fart” thread [url=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/470497-clam-fart-oh-my-god-what-did-i-do-p1.html%5Dhere%5B/url”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/470497-clam-fart-oh-my-god-what-did-i-do-p1.html]here[/url]. He was accepted.
Generally I think the above are correct. However, there are definitely some AO’s that punish multiple errors. How many it takes to have them say “This person is not for us. They neither know English well enough nor took the care to get it proofread.” is impossible to know. For some the latter is actually worse than the former, because it tells them you didn’t care enough to take the extra step to try and make it error-free.
