by Kelly Wilson
A Typo in Your Application: Harmless Mistake or Deal-Breaker?
When I led business school admissions, I enjoyed reading applications. I looked forward to learning about individuals who might be joining our community each year. However, not every application submitted was perfect – after all, candidates are humans, and humans make mistakes. When I ran into a mistake in a person’s application, I would categorize it as either immaterial, annoying (yes, this is a category in my book!), or significant.
- Immaterial – This could be a minor misspelling, a missed comma, or a couple of transposed letters. A single minor typo like this will have no real impact on your application.
- Annoying – This is the kind of mistake where an applicant forgets to change the school’s name somewhere in their essay. Oof. I guarantee that this is where I, and many other adcom members, would roll their eyes. It is just sloppy – and unavoidable! If you are going to consider using a portion of what you wrote for School #1, rework it and submit it to School #2, you must be intentional about the changes you make. You want to avoid this kind of error. You can use the “Find and Replace” feature to check for incorrect names in your document or, better yet, use the “Read Aloud” functionality to listen to your essay.
No, this mistake will not automatically cause you to get dinged, but it could be perceived as a lack of genuine interest and questionable commitment, not to mention it leaves a negative impression of your professionalism.
- Significant – In this case, the typo changes the intended meaning or renders something misleading. For example, a recent client submitted the wrong version of their resume, which included a typo in the start date of their most recent position. They had been laid off and didn’t start a new job for four months. However, in the uploaded version, it appeared that they had started their current job three months before they were laid off from the previous one. No doubt this would be confusing, because the information didn’t align with the content of one of the examples they used in their essays. In this case, action was necessary.
The client crafted a brief explanation of the error and submitted it with an updated version of their resume. If a school permits these kinds of updates, it will have specific instructions for how to go about amending your application post-submission. Be certain to follow these instructions.
What happens, though, if a school won’t let you resubmit materials or explain a mistake? What if it really is too late? Reach out to us at Accepted, and we can help you figure out your next steps.
As the former executive director of admissions at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School and assistant dean of admissions at Georgetown’s McDonough School and the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School, Kelly Wilson has 23 years’ experience overseeing admissions committees and has reviewed more than 38,000 applications for the MBA and master’s programs in management of information systems, computational finance, business analytics, and product management. Want Kelly to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!
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