Today we have a guest post from Anna Ivey, founder of Ivey Consulting.
Typos. In very important missives. That you’ve already sent to very important people. Argh.
Everyone has been there at one time or another, including lawyers (which can be especially embarrassing). And, as you might be acutely aware, it happens to future lawyers, too. When you’ve been staring at the same thing six hundred times while you polished it, trying to get it just so, your eyes can start missing the little things. The irony.
It’s that time of year when people start freaking out over typos they find after they’ve hit the submit button. I feel your pain. There’s no magic wand or time machine to undo that submission, so here’s the best you can do:
If you find a typo after you have submitted your application, call up the admissions office, be very nice (always!) to the person who answers the phone, and ask if you can substitute that particular document. If your file hasn’t already been sent off for evaluation, they’ll probably let you send in the corrected document. Ask them how they would like to receive the correction, and do not treat their reply as an offer for you to negotiate some other method. It’s their way or the highway.
Even if they let you send in a corrected document, they might not be willing to get rid of the old one. They might only add a more recent copy to the file, but it’s unlikely that admissions officers will do a line-by-line comparison anyway. So be it. That’s still the best outcome in these circumstances.
If you can’t substitute that page or that document, go to your Happy Place with the knowledge that the odds are they won’t even notice your typo. If, on the other hand, you find multiple errors dispersed throughout your application, you’ve got bigger problems, whether you leave the mess the way it is or ask to substitute the entire thing. One typo is human; multiple typos make you look sloppy.
I’ll end on a happy note. An applicant once called the admissions office at the University of Chicago Law School, where I used to work, and sheepishly confessed that he had misspelled his own name on the application, and what was his best option to fix that? The wonderful woman manning the phones (a) chuckled and (b) said, “Don’t worry about it, honey, I’ll just fix it in our system. All taken care of.”
Anna Ivey was a lawyer and Dean of Admissions at the University of Chicago Law School before founding Ivey Consulting and assembling a team of experts to coach college, law school, and business school applicants one-on-one in order to help them navigate the law school application process.
