<p>After I submitted my finish version of supplement essay to Stanford and Princeton, I found out that my word count is way over their word limits. Like more than 150 words...</p>
<p>I don't know how I could get past that! </p>
<p>Anyway, do you think I won't get in those colleges because of that?</p>
<p>I'm dying right now.... please help me!!!</p>
<p>A lot of applicants are stressing about this right now. Here’s my take on it.</p>
<p>For the most part, the word counts are recommendations rather than limits. Adcoms read a lot of these essays, perhaps more than a hundred a day, and they probably aren’t going to take the time to run word counts to look for “violators”.</p>
<p>More importantly, they’re making quick judgements on the essays as they read them. A poorly written essay, whether over, under, or right on the target word count, will be unpleasant to read and will be viewed unfavorably. A good essay, one that grabs the reader’s attention, makes them smile, whatever, will be well received. As a general rule, brevity is better, but a well written 600 word essay will be better received than a precisely 500 word yawner.</p>
<p>I read a lot of essays for local scholarship competitions. The sad fact is, most are painful to read. When you’re in an essay reading flow you are forced to make quick judgements. You end up rewarding or penalizing applicants based on quick impressions. Self-indulgent, boring, cliche, flippant, and awkward thesaurus word heavy essays get a quick thumbs-down. Too long essays have one strike against them out the gate. But if they’re good, the reader will react favorably.</p>
<p>Good luck, and try to relax.</p>
<p>thank you for replying so fast!
I’m not sure my essay was good enough to impress them…
ahhh I will be agitated until they finally make a decision on mid-march to april</p>
<p>One thing that might help you relax: In my opinion, for whatever it’s worth, the importance of essays is overrated. It’s natural that applicants focus a lot on essays at crunch time because at that point virtually everything else is beyond their control. Their transcripts are what they are, as are their test scores and ECs. All you can control at the end are your essays and your mid-year grades. Hence the focus on essays. People stress about it, write and re-write, over edit, etc. CC kids beg each other for editing help and tell each other in “chance me” threads that if only they “write killer essays”, they’ll be fine.</p>
<p>I’m not an adcom, but I’ve read a lot of scholarship essays and I’ve read countless essays for applicants on CC and in RL. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Most essays are mediocre. A few are truly well written, but more are dreadful. I could be completely wrong, but I suspect that in most cases the quality of the essays does not determine the applicant’s acceptance or rejection.</p>
<p>Again, good luck and try to relax. It’s out of your hands now.</p>