The Truth: The Senior Lie

The concept of being a senior was a daydream for my time as an underclassmen. Upon entering the senior year, it wasn’t as dreamy as it sounded— with the classes being relatively easy, but it was the college application season that screamed at us. I always had imagined it being easy in the first place, until the Common App opened up on August 1st. The easiest year, being a senior, was not so easy as it seemed.

The Truth:

As a senior, you are thrown into much higher expectations in completing your applications. No one is there to guide you besides your counselor. You’re essentially being left alone to deal with the mess that you need to keep track of everyday.

During my time, many of my upperclassmen who told my grade (class of ‘23) that it would be a breeze. They never said what was going to be easy— but they simply left out the college application season out of the equation. More people like us, needed to be more aware of that idea. As a senior myself, I had concealed the amount of stress of applying into colleges in front of my underclassmen and I understood what the seniors meant. It was far easier to conceal the emotions within me, but not the stress. The overall idea of senior year was going to be relaxing on certain days, with the absence of less assignments compared to our previous junior year.

Whatever was within the stress was the accumulation of what is necessary for our application, such as discussing letter of recommendations, planning out what you want to present in your application like extracurriculars, worrying about how you can write your essays, and even the amount of essays you’ll get from applying to certain schools. As I am writing this, I currently have about twenty-ish essays to write for all my colleges, which I only have ten on my list so far. With applying into early decision, I’m still revising and editing all my essays to make sure that it would portray the idea that I want— and that’s not all. This was what the seniors meant when they’re unspoken about their issue behind their head.

I hope that the underclassmen know the truth behind the walls that the seniors don’t necessarily tell anyone— so that everyone could be prepared to face the challenge that’s in front of them. This is just the one portion that we don’t mention as a senior, which I hope people are aware of when they come to their final year of high school.