College applications season has now rolled around the corner and it is time for seniors to get prepared for the stressful admissions. Many of the college applications open in early fall around August or September but the window usually closes in January. This gives seniors about four or five months to complete their assignments, papers, ect. Generally most students apply to 5-10 colleges that means that the workload has students start their college applications the summer break before their senior year of high school. All this preparation is in order to maximize one’s chance of getting into the college that they want to.

Along with the assignments being completed to apply for these colleges, for example the personal statement essay, students take strenuous exams like the SAT and ACT. Even with the decreasing importance of these assessments, students still stress over them to this day. According to Prep Scholar, “college admissions teams are going to evaluate you based on more than just your test scores. Your essays, extracurriculars, and letters of recommendation will speak for you too”. In addition to the stressful tests, the competitiveness of schools is also a big factor when applying to colleges. Popular UC colleges like UCI and UCSB have around a thirty percent acceptance rate with schools like University of Los Angeles California with an acceptance rate of less than fifteen percent. With this in mind, kids who apply to colleges try to make their applications unique to try to stand out from other students who want to to end up in the same place as them.

“Out of all the steps that it took to apply to these colleges, one of the hardest parts was getting letters of recommendation”. Says Micheal Klychman, a sophomore at the University of Chicago. Klychman says that this is such an important step because it proves your credibility of all the information about you that you wrote in your essay. “For me, since I’m a math major, I reached out to my former math teachers and also my favorite former teachers about my recommendation letters,” says Klychman. One important thing to keep in mind is that every year teachers and staff write recommendation letters and that could make them seem generic or broad. According to BigFuture, “It can also be helpful to provide your teacher with a resume or “brag sheet.” Something you might want to include on your brag sheet or in your discussion with your teacher,” this could include big projects you have done in the past, some of the key things you learned in the teachers class, and also your participation in that class. The recommendation is one of many things one must do to have a decent college application. The college application essay is notoriously the most popular part of the college application.

There are a few different kinds of college essays. One main essay that all colleges accept University of California colleges(UC) is the Personal Statement essay. According to Story2,” Essentially, the personal statement is an essay that allows the admissions reader to learn more about you as a person. This means that they should reveal something about who you are in both the content and voice of the essay.” This essay is very important for colleges since the fact that the applications are based on art and science. With all the data points like GPA, test scores, and the number of AP and honors classes you took, the college still needs to see who you are as a person. The essay will always give you a prompt but the point of the writing is still to see who you are. Because of this many students end up failing describing themselves by over detailing the answer to the prompt, not adding enough details about you asd a person. Another essay one may write is the Personal Insight Questions essay which is for UC admissions. This essay is similar but you get eight different prompts to choose four out of. These prompts are smaller but they have to be just as detailed.

Overall there are many anxiety inducing steps involved in applying for colleges but once all taken into account, it can be very well managed.”Once you can see it visually, the number of tasks and a schedule to do them, it simplifies a lot of things,” says Christine Chu, a premier college admissions counselor at IvyWise. These are all important things seniors are going through this year to expand their years of learning.