im learning the hard way

[hamster09]

oh dear... i was missing the word "the" on my last sentence. my friends who i asked to read it did not catch it either.

that submit button was sooooo tempting i fell in the trap. now i feel really bad.

[fuzzylogician]

oh dear... i was missing the word "the" on my last sentence. my friends who i asked to read it did not catch it either.

that submit button was sooooo tempting i fell in the trap. now i feel really bad.

Ugh, seriously, stop tormenting yourself. One typo is not going to make any difference in your application whatsoever. If anybody notices--and that's a big if since none of your friends noticed it when they reading--people are just going to think your sop has a typo in it and move on. No one will deny your admission because of a single missing word.

[LateAntique]

If they don't fire professors for typos and other sorts of errors in their books, I seriously doubt they will keep you out of graduate school because of one. Can you imagine the adcomm that would do that?

"Did you see they left out a 'the' in this sentence?"

"WHAT A MORON! DON'T LET THAT PERSON IN!"

[mudlark]

Lemme tell you a little story about my friend. She's the most successful grad student in her program. Tons of funding, expected to do great things. In the grant application that won her the aforementioned tons of funding, she misspelled the first name of the key theorist that she works with. Badly. And more than once. Still won the prize.

The typo will not hurt your chances.

[modernity]

Here's the rule I suggest... don't look at your applications after you have submitted them until after April 15th, when you have or have not gotten into a school. (If you got in, you may not even care!) This is the only time its really important and relevant for you to look over your application again. If you look at it now... you're just going to torture yourself over the next several months (ugh. months!!!) over what you could have improved or changed - and there's nothing you can do. Its just going to keep you up nights wondering. So don't do it!!

I also must say that forgetting a "the", especially if it was missed by everyone else that read it, may very well be missed by the committee too.

[BillyPilgrim]

After I submitted my first application I realized I put "my" instead of "me" in one sentence. d'oh.

[fuzzylogician]

From one of last year's threads:

"I had far worse typos in my apps. In one of my essays the word hitch ended up as b**** and makeshift became makeshit. Needless to say I am still deeply mortified."

[hamster09]

From one of last year's threads:

"I had far worse typos in my apps. In one of my essays the word hitch ended up as b**** and makeshift became makeshit. Needless to say I am still deeply mortified."

oh wow!!! lol. i found that funny no offense.

i have really bad eyes too. after working on several SOPs sometimes i feel like i'm becoming cross eyed.

and i suppose that with deadlines right around the corner everyone feels that feeling of just wanting to hit that button.

its probably a good idea to never look back when you hit it.

[happy_elephant]

I've been dealing with this all weekend, since I've been referring to SoPs from submitted applications when revising the ones I'm still working on. I've been having moments of "Wait, ugh, that sound awkward..." over and over again. That being said, I learned not to freak out about this about a month ago when a professor I'd been communicating with asked me to send a draft of my SoP and writing sample...I sent them, and he replied with the oh-so-gentle advice that I should fix that part when I mention how much I'd like to work with a professor who hasn't taught at that university since the seventies.

The rest of his reply was encouraging, though, so I think everyone's advice here is solid: a mistake is a mistake, and it's probably not a big deal. Good luck