Well, I completely forgot that this blog post was a thing that we had to do and I am currently writing this at 12:30 AM. I was literally lying in bed for like ten minutes or so, my eyes were closed and I was beginning to doze off, when I realized that this was a thing that was due today! So forgive me if it's not as 'spiffing' as my other ones, I'm 1/5 awake, 4/5 asleep.
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So, Harvard Early Action acceptance comes out in like four days. How stressful is that huh? I never considered myself as someone who sees stress as overbearing, and I never thought I would be stressing out over whether or not I would be getting into a college, yet here I am. I'd really like to get in, partly because I want to go there and partly so that I don't need to finish my other apps yay. And on the top of the college stress, I've got the "taper blues" as I like to call it, where you start swimming very poorly at practice during taper which ultimately stresses the hell out of you. I've got Junior Nationals in Federal Way this week and Israeli Winter Nationals in Netanya in two weeks, and the taper blues are more prevalent than ever, so I'm anxious about how I'll perform. I'll still do good. I hope. My teammates didn't do so hot at the US Open meet the past couple of days. But I think they were also sick or something so we'll see what happens.
But I digress.
Anyways, basically what I'm trying to say is that the anticipation is a lot more stressful than I thought it would be.
That sorta segways into the main topic of the blog post. One thing I'd tell a future senior about the college application process is how stressful it is before you receive that acceptance or rejection letter. I cannot stress (haha) how stressful it is to count down the days until you find out where you're going to school for the next four years of your life. You'd think that right after banging out your actual application the stress would just dissipate. After all, you are done with the application. And for the most part, it does...for a while. And then you realize there's a week until they announce who's in and who's out, and you're just like "well [expletive]."
I would also tell the future seniors that they shouldn't do what I did: waiting till the last minute to get it done (just like this blog post wow). I think I waited till like the last two weeks to start writing my personal statement for Early Action. Same with my UCs. I waited till five days before the application deadline for UCs. And I started and finished my USC application the day it was due, which was very stupid of me. But the difference with that is that I feel like I work better the closer I am to the due date (crazy right?). That translates from school, where I usually wait till the day before to start and finish my five-page English paper (which funny enough, I just did that three days ago), for lack of a better example. I don't know why, but I just feel like I do better under pressure or something. But I know that's not true for like 99% of the world, so I would make sure to tell the future seniors to get started early.
Oh, speaking of starting early, this is totally off topic, but Carnegie Mellon offers Early Decision applications to Juniors. I think it's a binding application so it means you need to want to go to Carnegie Mellon from the get-go. It's just crazy to me that you could start and finish all of your college applications (as a non-athlete) in your junior year. That really surprised me when I found out.
I'd also tell them to be more organized with their supplements and whatnot. I'm a very disorganized person so it was a bit difficult to manage my time and manage my supplements. I would tend to just do random ones all over the place and go about my apps a bit unplanned. Which is something that's not super detrimental to your college applications, but still would be beneficial to fix.
To sum it up, I'd tell future seniors to get started early, try to stay organized and plan out your apps, and be prepared for the stress of a lifetime. And I wish I knew all of that beforehand, instead of as hindsight. Although, I could use that advice for my regular decision applications. Hopefully, I won't need to do them.
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I know these aren't a GIFs, but they're very accurate representations of the only two emotions you feel during college apps so I hope Mrs Snyder will let it slide: https://twitter.com/SASBurnerAcct/status/1203880849638404096?s=20 https://twitter.com/SASBurnerAcct/status/1203890306749489152?s=20
ok it's 1:23 . time to sleep :)
One more little digression: before writing this I read ~100 pages of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (which is a superb book, you should read it) and I noticed that while writing this blog post I was sort-of mimicking Junot Diaz's writing style in the book, where it's kinda nonchalant in a way. Or like he's just writing everything that comes to his mind. Kinda interesting how that sorta stuff happens.
ok bye.