I have always heard the stories of how senior year is usually one of the easiest years in one’s high school career, and that your junior year is the hardest. I would like to say that I really don’t believe that to be true.

Senior year, one has to deal with the stress of applying to college, waiting for acceptance, making the decision on a college, applying for FAFSA, applying for scholarships, applying for housing, and on top of all this keeping grades up until the end of the year. This year is not even halfway over and I have already had to take multiple days off due to stress.

Applying to college is difficult. College applications have pages and pages that one has to go through. Applicants have to write up an essay for each college, with varying required word counts. On the Common App, students have to write essays in between 250- 650 words, but some colleges may request more. Other colleges do not want you to write an essay but just make a list about your achievements. Then you may need to get recommendation letters, and they must provide extra information to their teachers about their achievements. You also have to scrounge up the money to pay to submit the application.

After you submit all your college applications, it becomes time to play the waiting game. It can take weeks, or months for colleges to get back to you about their decision. This time is stressful, as you have no idea what is going on with it.

Heck when I was waiting I thought maybe something had not submitted right, and I also began to worry immensely what would happen if I did not get accepted to the college that I wanted to go to? What if my SAT scores weren’t what they wanted? Should I have taken it again? Did I do enough extracurriculars? Are my grades good enough? These are all things that ran rapidly through my mind for the month that it took to receive all  of the decision letters.

After receiving my acceptances, I began to stress about making the right decision. Either before or after making the decision you have to fill out FAFSA. FAFSA is the free application for financial aid. Everyone has to apply for it and it tells you what you get in money, and your loan rates.

You also then need to start applying for scholarships and it is stressful. Scholarship applications result in more essays. You will also need to line up teachers to write you recommendation letters for scholarships.

For housing, you need to gather up that money to pay the deposit. Then hope one of your friends want to room with you and give you their code. Then you just wait for when the school gives you your assignment. Waiting is stressful.

School alone is stressful enough, especially with this added stress of completing all of this senior stuff.