<p>So don't laugh at me but this is kind of an eleventh hour question (the app is due tomorrow at 5 central):
For the presidential scholars 'candidate essay', we're given 10,800 characters to respond with. Does anyone know if this is just a terrible upper bound (and they give us plenty of space to not use) or if we're actually expected to use some 2,000 words?
Any approximate word counts of previous applicants (or even estimates!) would be amazing--thanks guys.</p>
<p>i’m another applicant for this year but if it makes you feel any better I had the same question. mine’s a couple thousand characters under. The main one’s the only one that doesn’t count blank lines against you, which helps keep it under control, too. My guess is that you write the best essay you can, rather than try to extend it to fill the character count. But I’ll defer to people with more experience</p>
<p>On a related note, they gave us so little room on the other ones. I had to tweak every single one character by character to get it to fit. I wish I could transfer them from the main essay… ugh. Good luck unimportant!</p>
<p>hi guys, I’m applying this year too… I would guess that it’s just them giving us a LOT of extra space to work with, it seems unlikely that they’d want to read 2,000-word essays. just my take on it, though…</p>
<p>hey all, i’m procrastinating to finish this thing too, and I was wondering the same thing. By the time I’m done, I think I’ll be around 750-800 words, but I think I wrote a lot more than I usually would just because of that huge limit. but it would just seem outrageous for them to expect us to come near that limit.
good luck getting this all done.</p>
<p>I know this is a few years later, but with regards to what 10scholar wrote about the main one not counting blank lines against you, does that mean that for the short answers if you don’t use the whole space it is counted against you?</p>