Hi, I'm a senior who applied to colleges/universities from several different countries.
I'm not asking about a college in the U.S., so it might be irrelevant, but I thought why not?
I submitted an application in early March, and I looked at my portal again recently just to check. Turns out, I had a few mistakes in my essays that do not affect the content necessarily, but you can still see the mistakes. For example, I would have multiple paragraphs, but instead of indenting the first word of each paragraph, the second line is indented. There's also a punctuation mistake. In one of the words, I had to include a period (well it's not exactly a period but it's some kind of punctuation not seen in English) and when I checked the PDF version, I realized that it says ᐧ instead.
I think it may be because of the format change because when I submitted my essays, the format and font of the writing were different. However, when I checked the essays again, the format changed into a PDF version. I remember reading my essay before I submitted it in early-March, and I don't recall seeing those mistakes.
Would these be big mistakes?
Thank you.
As an International Student, I would imagine that you get some sort of leeway for small mistakes like missing a comma, apostrophe or using "there" instead of "their" etc. But if your sentence includes ᐧ, to the reader it seems like you didn't edit your essays because that's an additional 6 characters that makes no sense.
Who knows how someone would react and interpret that mistake to be? It is completely futile to speculate on the ramifications of the additional 6 characters in your essay.
If you are still waiting for decisions from these schools where you know you sent this essay, then perhaps it would ease your mind to write them an email and explain that there was conversion problem when you converted your essay into a .pdf and that it was an oversight that you didn't realize. Something to that effect.
Good luck.
To keep this community safe and supportive:
Admission officers spend around 3-5 minutes on your essay, looking for key themes and content. A few grammatical/spelling errors aren't going to make or break your application.