The end of the semester has come to pass. Yet you are still sitting behind a desk staring at the same personal essay for your college application. All the letters and symbols blur together and your eyes begin to cross. You are tired. It is late. You rub at your eyes, glance at the clock in the corner of your screen that reads 1:31am. Time has slipped away from you.
In a year or so you’ll be sitting at a different desk. Hunched over a stack of papers. Finals week. You will be glad to finally pack your bags, wave goodbye to the friends you’ve made, and make it back home in time for the holiday season. You will think back on this exact moment in awe. You did it! You worked your butt off and made it here.
I know that the college application season may feel relentless and tiring. There is not much I can do or say to make it any less so. And to be quite honest, my own application process I felt completely and utterly alone. My parents–never having attended college themselves–weren’t able to answer my burning questions or prepare me for the next steps. I was worried about my personal statements, getting fees waived, and if the colleges I was applying to were even the right fit for me. How does one even come to that realization?! (a question that plagued my mind for months on end)
Unfortunately, I cannot answer this question for you. The only person who can is, well…yourself. But, I can give you a tip that helped me narrow this down. Put aside the personal essay and the worries for one second. Trust me.
Open a google doc or excel sheet or whatever app you can that has a grid sheet. List out all of the colleges you’ve ever considered or dreamt of attending (placing them under the categories of “safety”, “target”, or a “reach” school). Fill in the chart with the locations of each school, their application deadlines, majors they offer you would be interested in, if they are a private or public school, and last (but certainly one of the most important) “why do you see yourself here?/what draws you to this school?”.
Then, I want you to think about all of the requirements you desire in a school. Do you want to be somewhere close to home or farther away? What about subjects you would like to explore (are you more stem or art based? maybe even business)?
This may not give you a clear answer for which school is best for you, but it will help you figure out what schools interest you the most and why. And it might serve as a reminder of why filling these applications out and putting in the work will one day be worthwhile. It might give you a sense of what it will be like to sit at a desk your freshmen year of college and smile back on this moment in time when you felt like your head was barely above water.
Don’t forget to lean on those around you. Ask for help if you need it. And give yourself a little bit of grace because even if it may not feel like it right now, you got this!
-A’Daja