Senior year is supposed to be a fun and relaxed year due to teachers telling you during your junior year to take easy classes.

“It will be less stress and more fun if you take easy classes.”

That’s what they would always say. Many students do listen to those teachers and some don’t. I decided to listen to my teachers during my junior year and thank goodness I did because senior year is already VERY stressful.

Junior year, you usually start going on college visits. You walk around the campus, ask questions, see what you might want to do at that school and try to see yourself being at the particular school. Well, then you go home and kind of just forget about the tour and you just go back to doing school work for junior year classes.

Summer comes around and you have so much fun with your friends and you work nonstop and it’s just a chill summer. Until, you have to fill out your common app. Let me give you some advice. Fill out your common app during the summer, way before school starts. It will allow you to have more time for homework and more time to decide which colleges you want to apply to. That common app is a long process that is crucial when applying for colleges. It will ask you to fill out what classes you have taken since freshman year and what extracurricular activities you have participated in over the years. It will also ask you to write an essay in case colleges require a college essay for your application.

When making a college decision, take your time. Go on many college visits to your top three schools and make a pros and cons list in order to make that decision a little easier for you. Also, apply early. Applying early increases your chance to get into the school that you want to go to. It also helps you get first dibs on what residence hall you want when that time to choose comes along. Applying early also relieves that pressure during the fall so you can enjoy football games and focus on other classes.

The biggest problem with choosing the college you want to go to could be the cost of it. College is expensive and it’s not getting any cheaper. Out-of-state schools can be hard to choose because of the in-state money you might not get. There are many different scholarship opportunities that you can achieve but it can be hard especially when you have a busy schedule and can’t write essay after essay. Making a goal for yourself to get 2-4 essays done per month will put you ahead of schedule and will make it much easier to focus on other schoolwork and your social life.

Another tip is when you make the college decision, try to look for roommates right away. There should be Instagram pages that you can follow and contact people on to help find the perfect roommate(s). In my experience, finding roommates on Instagram is really easy and pretty fun. Once you send all your information to the Instagram page, it will be pretty stressful at first getting a bunch of direct messages from random people who are planning to go to the same college as you. But, once you get to talking and eventually decide to room with one another, it begins to feel so real.

Choosing a college can be very stressful but once you decide which one is for you, it all gets so much easier and it makes you feel so much excitement.