flowerchild

would either of you mind if i PMed you the personal statement i submitted to Chicago and you could tell me what you think I could cut. Thanks

Try calling their office, it helps to talk to someone personally. Before hanging up, ask for their name politely, and if you should follow up with them directly, or elsewhere.

I wrote a 2500 word and 2000 word SoP for two of my schools, but now Columbia wants a 1000 word SoP and I'm not sure what to include and what to leave out. Anthropology PhD. Anyone have any tips, or is anyone willing to share a Columbia SoP they wrote? Thanks

Thanks everyone. Maybe I'm silly, but I'm anal, and I called the Anthropology admin. It made a difference that it was my undergraduate institution and she knew me personally/ had been in touch with me, so she said I could send a clean copy to her email. Hope it all works out. General lesson I have learned from this: never add sentences or phrases at the last minute!!!!

So I turned in my SoP to University of Chicago (my top choice) and later discovered that it had 2 typos. I contacted admissions to ask if I could replace it. They responded saying that I could send them a scanned copy and they could add it to my file but it would have to be accompanied by a memo explaining. She said it would then be up to the department what they did with the memo and the uploaded copy. I had already sent a memo earlier, asking them to consider my online SoP rather than the hard copy submitted with my supplemental materials, as the latter was outdated. My question is: is this worth it or am I being too anal? I dont want to annoy the admissions committee by having them wade through 3 Candidate Statements and 2 memos and figure out which the right one is. On the other hand I dont know if typos are a deal-breaker. My typos were not major, in one place I wrote "ties to market-led growth" instead of "tied to market-led growth". In another, I spelled Interdisciplinary, "Interdiciplinary". Any advice would be appreciated.