Great.
I submitted my application to Vassar College, which I am totally in love with, and I reviewed that thing three hundred times. I had other people (including my AP Lit teacher!) review my supplements. And of course, as soon as I hit submit, out come the errors.
Over the course of my 4 essays, there are, I believe, 5 typos. No essay has more than 2 errors, and my Common App Essay is (or appears to be) flawless.
How bad is this? One is an extra “to”, one is my forgetting to put quotes around “The Communist Manifesto” (three people read this and no one said anything :(( ), and two are misplaced apostrophes (parent’s instead of parents and brothers instead of brother’s).
The sad thing is, I’m a good English student (though apparently, not that good :)) )
I’ve gathered that one or two typos in an app isn’t bad. This is five (the manifesto one seems particularly heinous).
So, how small of a ball should I curl up into over this?
(I’m being humourous, but I’m actually dying inside )
Hand on heart, whether or not you get into Vassar will not be affected at all by the typos.
And some free advice: stop obsessively re-reading/re-thinking your app! You will get your result, and I can tell you now - for certain!= that you will either get a place, be deferred to the next round or told, sorry, no- and no amount of angst will change which one it is.
So, find a distraction, and do it every time you get anxious about the result, do that. Studying for a specific final coming up is an old favorite- our collegekid who applied to Vassar ED kept art history index cards with her and every time she found herself being anxious about the result she pulled them out and reviewed them (and got an A on her AP Art History final exam). Bonus: she is doing the famous Art History course at Vassar now (4 years later, and after being deferred), and all that extra studying from then is paying off again
Good luck (and do the read the Clam Fart thread that @MaineLonghorn linked)
Everyone makes typos. In all honesty, most admissions officers are only skimming your essay the first few rounds. There’s a chance they may catch it (the human mind is programmed to mentally fix most typos). But even if they do, then it’s a big question of if they’ll get the gist anyway and if they’ll care enough about one typo to reject.
College counselors stress typos and editing for good reason - we want to make sure your chances are as good as possible and want to account for anything that can be accounted for. But ultimately, part of my position is I have students obsessively check for typos because - even though there’ll always be a few - I’d rather have a few than a lot.
Honestly, I think one reason we also stress about typos is it’s something we can control…unlike, say, the past four years of a life or if a counselor will like an essay topic…
)