<p>My research abstract I submitted to Johns Hopkins is one and a half pages long single spaced which I realize is quite long for an abstract. The only reason I made it this long was because I was writing the abstract for Columbia University who said they accept 1-2 page long abstracts. </p>
<p>I'm guessing I'm Ok for Columbia since that's what they said, but for other schools I ended up sending the same abstract. My mentor who looked over it said it's fine that some abstracts are long. The admissions officers, I'm scared, might consider it too long and that might hurt me in the admissions process.</p>
<p>Almost by definition, abstracts are 150-200 words. What is your question, what is your hypothesis, what did you do (1 or 2 sentences), what did you find, where can you go from there? That’s an abstract.</p>
<p>Don’t worry, it’s not going to hurt you. Each school looks at research submissions differently - some simply view it as evidence that you’ve done research, while others (especially some of the smaller, research-intensive universities) will ask faculty in your field to read through your submission and give their thoughts, keeping in mind that the work is from a high schooler. From what I understand (having volunteered in Admissions as an undergrad, but never having actually read applications), it’s highly unlikely that the faculty comments will hurt your overall admissions chances; however, at Hopkins, if you’re applying as an engineering major, your previous research work is a huge part of being considered for the Westgate scholarship.</p>