It begins freshman year, teachers and counselors tell you to start thinking about your future, and to begin building your resume for future college applications. Most shrug it off, thinking they have endless amounts of time, while the select few destined for the ivy leagues begin on day one of freshman year pushing themselves to achieve perfect grades and cramming their schedules full of extracurricular activities that “look good” on a college application to accompany their spotless record.

Sophomore year is the year that nobody warns you about, but creeps up on the heels of an easy freshman year to catch most students by surprise and trap them in its whirlwind of more challenging classes and higher standards of success. Therefore, many don’t give college a single thought during this time, other than the occasional “oh no that’s going on my transcript!” But even those worries are fleeting and forgotten once the next marking period begins.

It’s Junior year where the pressure finally begins to build, while adults, teachers and counselors expect you to suddenly have some idea of what you want to do with your life. The majority of students have a vague idea, but at this point, some students still are not overly concerned with college. Yes, grades mean more, and it’s time for the SAT’s, but the idea of college is still fairly surreal.

Panic doesn’t set in until the SAT scores have returned, junior year is over and you realize that the last set of grades colleges will see for the most part have been calculated and finalized. Then students realize that college is around the corner, and people expect more from them in terms of future plans.

The reality is that most of us just don’t know. We may like this college, or think that that major sounds interesting, but even at this time of year, when application deadlines are right in front of us we still are unsure of the decisions we have made and how they will affect our future.  We turn to adults for advice, but they can only assist us so much in terms of helping us decide where we want to spend the next four years of our life. It’s a stressful time as we go from, in most cases, dependent teenagers to responsible adolescents in the span of mere months as we are forced to wake up and face the reality of the next stage of our lives. Glenelg High student Shilpa Raj says, “It’s a really stressful process and it involves a lot of thought, time, and effort, but it pays off in the end when you get the acceptance letters.”

The endless lists of deadlines and requirements cloud our minds as we try to declare a major, get the final grade we need, inch our SAT scores up another hundred points and choose our “dream school”. Even more stress is added when finances are added to the college equation. The difference between a school’s tuition and the actual cost to attend for a year are often very different, and in most cases the dream school we picture ourselves at is out of reach. So we begin another endless application process for scholarships, trying to bring the school onto our realm of possibility.

With spring will come the acceptance letters we all hope for anxiously. Until then the best we can do is enjoy our senior year and the many once in a lifetime experiences it brings.
—————————————————————————-
Caroline Paper is a student at Glenelg High School and an intern at the Village Connector Community News. She is passionate about literature, food and writing. To get in touch with Caroline, please contact The Village Connector.