Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.
As MBA admissions consultants, we know firsthand the intense pressure business school candidates feel, and we sometimes wish we could convince you that small points are really just that—small points. We get asked, “Should this be a comma or a semicolon?” and want to respond, “Please trust us that the admissions committee will not say, ‘Oh, I would have accepted this applicant if she had used a comma here, but she chose a semicolon, so DING!’” That said, we are certainly not telling you to ignore the small things. Details matter—the overall impression your application makes will depend in part on your attention to typos, font consistency, and grammar, for example—but we encourage you to make smart and reasonable decisions and move on. You can be confident that your judgment on such topics will likely be sufficient.