Taking the Leap (Off a Cliff)

As you enter your senior and junior year, you will start to begin the most terrifying, stressful process of your high school career: applying and preparing for college. To begin the process, you must start to fill out college applications. Whether you are doing it through the Common App or through the college’s personal application, you will find that they will ask enough information about you to write your entire life’s biography. This will be followed by an essay that makes you feel like the readers wish to stare into the depths of your very soul. Finally, while praying to the highest power you know, you submit the application. Once you’ve gathered up the courage to go to the guidance office and ask them to submit your transcription as well as to grovel to a few teachers for letters of recommendation, your application process has been completed.

For a few days or possibly weeks you will feel accomplished and relaxed because now you have submitted your application and your grownup responsibilities are complete for now. This is just the calm before the storm. Once that first stage passes, you will begin to worry. Did I get in? How long until they contact me? If they haven’t contacted me yet does that mean I didn’t get in? Depending on where you applied, this period of torture may end quickly and they will get back to you within a few weeks. For those whom God has abandoned, they may have to wait several months. This is only the beginning. Once you have been accepted, the real struggle begins.

After being caught up in the whirlwind of applying for colleges there may have been a few things that you have forgotten about. First: Money. Unfortunately, in the United States it will cost a truckful of money to get a degree. Unless you wish to sell one of your limbs or organs, you must apply for scholarships, grants etc. And guess what most of them require. More essays to stare into your soul. You may apply to a little less than 1,000 small ones that come from seemingly shady organizations or to a few larger ones where you may have to kill the other applicants in order to thin out the competition.

Once you’ve got that ordeal sorted out you actually have to prepare to live on your own. Unfortunately you can’t take your parent’s fridge with you. The first step into becoming an adult is buying your own appliances. Exciting right? After checking your colleges for what to bring/not bring (so put back that George Foreman grill), it’s time to go shopping. The slightly more fun part of this whole experience is the rest. Now is the time to pick out your bedspreads, decorations, other things like that so that that tiny dorm room will feel like home. Just make sure you get sheets that fit that bed size that for some reason only colleges have. And finally you are ready to go off on your own and have to deal with stuff like annoying bosses and taxes. Or, you know, a job that you love and life long happiness. Whatever works.