By Madeline Zavala ’24
Senior year is your year. It’s the year of your final homecoming, your final prom, your last school year with your peers, and much more. Although senior year is filled with tons of fun and memorable moments, it’s also the year where you apply to college. Typically, this process starts at the beginning of the school year and sometimes even before that. A lot of students describe this to be stressful while others say it felt like nothing to them.
During the beginning of my senior year, I noticed a lot of my peers stressed out over applying to college. I was confused because I was not. I was done with my common app essay, college specific essays, my resume, and personalizing my common app to ready my application. At that point in time I was only waiting for my letters of recommendation. I realized that I had a lot more time to work on my application, and therefore a lot less stress, because I started my application during my junior year and continued it over the summer.
I had the opportunity to interview Jennifer Ostrosky, one of Derby High School’s school counselors, on her opinion about beginning the college application process in junior year and how it can be beneficial to students. “I started the process junior year so that’s a great point because I thought to myself ‘why not have everything pretty much done so that senior year all that you have to be doing is applying to colleges,'” Ostrosky explained. She then provided an explanation of what the college application process is and what is expected of a student while filling out the common application. “The start of the process is students have to get themselves onto the common application because that’s the way that typically kids are applying to colleges and then we help them link their accounts to naviance because that’s the way in which we send out the supporting documents like their transcripts, school profile, letters of recommendation and things like that. So that’s how it starts. We also work with the English department for juniors so during junior year they’re supposed to be working on their college essay and their resume so that the goal is by the end of junior year all of that is done and over the summer they can start filling out those sections on the common application,” Ostrosky added.
Besides interviewing Ostrosky, I conducted a survey of the junior class about what they know and what they don’t know about the college application process as a whole. A question asked in the survey was for juniors to rate their knowledge from 1-10 about the process, and 91.7% of the 18 students who took the survey had a rating below 5 while the remaining 8.3% had a rating of 6 to 8. The following question asked students if they knew what the common app is and if they know how to use it, and 58.3% answered that they don’t know what common app is, 25% know what common app is but don’t know how to use it, and 16.7% know what common app is.
When juniors were asked if they began the college application process in junior year before or during the summer, will it make their senior year easier, Ostrosky answered, “100%, which is why a couple of years ago I was thinking and worked with the school counseling department on shifting and doing it a little bit earlier just so that they wouldn’t have to worry about that senior year.” Ostrosky added, “My goal with my students is that they should be applying to colleges and be done before you leave for winter vacation so in order to do that you have a lot of work to do if you haven’t done your essay and your resume.”
Another survey, this time of the senior class, was done to gain knowledge about their experience while applying to college. Students described that the beginning of the college application process was stressful, but got better as time went on. The seniors also expressed that they wish they had more time to find letters of recommendation, using Naviance, filling out the common application, and understanding the different fee waivers. Overall, 75% of the 12 seniors who answered the survey wished to have had more time to fill out college applications while the remaining 25% felt that the time given was enough. When juniors were asked what they didn’t know about applying to college, they said they knew nothing about FAFSA, Early Action vs. Early Decision, fee waivers, where to apply and did not know anything at all.
Not knowing where to apply can be detrimental to the college application process since Ostrosky described that knowing where to apply is the most important thing to figure out before applying to college. When Ostrosky was asked what can be done for students to not only have a good application but also not feel rushed and stressed when applying to college, Ostrosky highlighted, “Start as early as possible. Make sure that their essay is all set and ready to go, make sure that they have a really well done resume, and make sure that they’re doing community service work.” The juniors feel the same way, since most explained how they want to have more time applying to college in order to perfect their application and resume.
It’s understandable that applying to college can be very stressful; the decisions you make can be the next step of your life, which is why it’s really important to begin your application process early. Filling out my common application over the summer has helped me tremendously. Not only was I not stressed out in the beginning of my senior year, I was already submitting applications to schools by the beginning of October. When you spend some time during the summer to answer common application questions, it saves so much time and relief when you begin your senior year. Finishing your college essay in junior year, revising your essay in senior year, and completing the common application over the summer will help in ways one can never imagine.
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