Picture this: you’ve just completed your first week of senior year, and you are already staring down the barrel of an excruciatingly long to-do list. Thanks to your schedule full of Advanced Placement classes, you have a paper due next week, a quiz on Monday, readings upon readings with analysis questions, and other assignments you don’t even want to think about. You log onto the Common App website for the umpteenth time to scroll miserably through all of the supplemental essays you have yet to complete. Not only that, but you have work or practice or some kind of time commitment later, too. Begrudgingly, you realize it is going to be a very long semester. 

There tends to exist a somewhat romanticized version of senior year in cheesy high school movies or the reminiscent rants you hear from your parents about the ‘times of their lives.’ What you usually don’t hear, and what actually takes up much of our time, is the uneasy balance of college essays, challenging classes, after-school activities, deadlines, the Common App, and so much more. This strange juxtaposition somehow makes the actual challenges of first semester senior year seem so much more jarring. 

It seems like expectations are getting higher every year. I know I’m not the only one who has seen a video online of some kid who claims to have cured cancer while taking 25 AP classes just to get rejected from all of their top colleges.

This kind of messaging leaves the rest of us feeling rather insecure, thinking that perhaps we are not doing enough.

My parents tell me to just keep my head down and get through the difficulties of this process and not to take it personally if a college rejects me. My friends say we just need to make it to second semester. I repeatedly tell myself I’m going to be fine. We are constantly trying to convince ourselves that this process is more manageable than it actually is.

It feels unlikely that any of these things will change within the next few months as I go through this process. However, if these realities go unspoken and the pattern of increasingly through-the-roof expectations continues, I can’t imagine what’s in store for future students. Maybe it’s time we trade in the idealized vision of senior year and take the step of acknowledging some of the more obvious problems. 

The bottom line is that it’s okay to admit how challenging this process can be rather than trying to maintain an image of having it together all the time. I know I have certainly been guilty of comparing my progress to others or overselling my experience, but a bit of honesty could go a long way. After all, it is natural to struggle and need support during such a chaotic time.