With the school year headed into the winter months, many seniors’ plates are overflowing, and not with a holiday feast. Balancing a typical course load with the stress and time commitment of college applications is not an easy feat. For many seniors, classes are picking up pace, and the work is piling up.
September started with the first task of the college application ordeal, the personal statement. A 650-word essay to sum up yourself and all your good points and prove to schools that you are, in fact, a student worthy of admission. To their credit, most 12th-grade language arts classes structured their first unit around helping students write their essays. The fact is though, the personal statement is only one step of the application process.
A standard college application consists of a bunch of familial and academic background forms, a personal statement, research into majors and financial aid for the specific college and if you’re lucky, a supplemental writing question or two. And that’s just for one college! Between remembering all the classwork, studying for tests, the SATs, different college applications and my personal belongings, I feel like I’ve been leaving little bread-crumb trails of forgotten things everywhere.
Now classes have shifted away from college-supportive units and into general coursework, leaving all application work to our free time. For many of the schools, Early Action and Early Decision deadlines are fast approaching and I think it’s fair to say we Seniors are a little overwhelmed. Not to mention the convenience of the school-day SAT scores coming out of November 1, a shared deadline for tons of schools. I still haven’t gotten my SAT scores, but that’s a whole other issue.
Seniors this year have also been blessed with the delay of the Free Application for Student Federal Aid, more commonly known as the FASFA. The FASFA has been delayed to December 1, instead of its typical October 1 opening for updates.
This online form is crucial to getting financial aid at many colleges, though some also accept the College Scholarship Service (CSS) profile. The result of this delay has meant that many students don’t have the same opportunities for Early Decision and Early Action compared to students who don’t need to know how much aid they qualify for before applying and/or accepting enrollment.
Not to mention the actual admissions process is just the tip of the iceberg right now. There is so much stress placed on Seniors to know what we’re going to do with our lives as young teens. It is typically expected that we should be in a couple of extracurriculars (with extra praise for sports), have a job, and have a career track set out. I’ve lost count of how many times people have asked me where I see myself in the next 10 years as if I wasn’t 7 years old 10 years ago.
All in all, this time of the year is doubly hectic as we try to navigate the demands of high school, figuring out our futures, and all the usual holiday chaos. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for it to be over!
