In mid September, I was called down to guidance to have my anticipated senior meeting. I was told by my guidance counselor to work on my Naviance Resume, college list, and create a Common App account. If I’m being honest I had pretty much neglected my Naviance account up until my junior year where I needed to pick out some colleges that fit my major, price range, location, and some other factors.

While in this meeting, I was told about the website “Common App” and I was genuinely confused because I had never heard of the Common App before this meeting. Some advice before going into this meeting is this: DO NOT do what I did and be on top of everything and please listen to your guidance counselors. Don’t keep pushing it to the side like I did for two years.

I ignored Naviance immediately as soon as I was told about it in my freshman year. When completing your Naviance resume make sure it sounds professional because if you plan on going to college, they will look at what you wrote and what you do in and out of school. These schools want a student who fits their community and their identity as a college. 

After the many rewrites and redrafts of my college essay it was finally complete and ready to be sent out to different colleges. Now, I was ready to start the long, dreaded, and feared road of the application process. The process of filling out your information for different colleges on the Common App, Naviance, and the SRAR is unnecessarily complicated and annoying.

I can vividly remember spending some nights punching a pillow because of how many questions that needed to be filled out and how dumb some of the questions were, but I digress. Since I was able to finish the questions for the Common App early compared to some of my peers, I now had a little bit of time to wait for the deadlines of some college applications.

It was nearing the end of October, and then on October 29, 2023 I had finally pressed submit on every college application. I have to admit that it was a bit anticlimactic, but I had a sigh of relief knowing I was finished and it might sound a bit cliche, but it did feel like the weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders.

If there is one thing that I can leave you with is that when you are going through the process of selecting a college, writing a resume, writing your essay, and filling out your applications, think of everything about the college application from Naviance, to the Common App, and the college essay as a job interview. You as a student want to show the admissions office why you deserve to attend their college both as a student and a person.

Now that I have finished, I can now look forward to the three upcoming breaks that we have in the months of November and December. But, as soon as Christmas break comes around, I am going to be sitting by my mailbox everyday no matter if it is raining, hailing , or even if there is a blizzard outside…I will be waiting for the acceptance letters to come back.