There is one word every senior does not want to hear. It is most often paired with a question mark and revolves around the future. This word sparks fear and anxiety in every person’s heart and leads some people to even cry, just a little (and if they say they haven’t cried, they’re lying). And this word is college.

Right now, seniors everywhere are applying to college, or hopefully, are in the process of applying to college whether that be filling out the applications or narrowing down which school to apply to. But, almost every college has one thing in common: essays.

“Had me crying, had me bleeding tears. I was staying up until three o’clock in the morning for no reason for all this college essay crap,” Jamil Tharp, senior, said, “I will never do it again. I’m happy it’s only a once in a lifetime thing we gotta do.” Depending on the school a senior is applying for, a student can write from one essay to three or four, and that is not including the essays used for scholarships or to get into special programs at said school(s).

Sarah Deneffe stated that she only had to “write one essay because [she is] not doing any colleges in the state”.

However this is not the case for senior Hasnain Ali, who is applying to fifteen colleges, thus meaning that multiple essays must be written.

“I don’t like writing essays, so the essays tend to be painful,” Ali said. He has been preparing for college by writing essays non-stop. The general consensus is that the application itself is easy, but the essays are what make or break the senior. Sunny Amin, a 2015 graduate stated that the application process is ” long, but easy”.

To prepare for college itself, students have been taking AP courses, Shreya Desai being one of those seniors. Despite taking these AP courses though, Desai is still “nervous on whether [she] get[s] into college or not”.

The application process does seem daunting, trying to narrow down one’s future to a single career, but that doesn’t mean the seniors aren’t looking forward to attending college.

Ali is looking forward to college “as long as [he gets his] essays in” while Deneffe has to “get in, and that hasn’t happened yet, so I’m just focusing on getting in”. The self-deprecating views on the college application seem like a downer, but all interviewee’s answered lightly and jokingly.

Advice to the incoming college freshman from Amin: “Do what you do, but be there, study and go to class. A lot of people don’t go to class because some classes don’t do attendance, but honestly if you don’t go to class you won’t learn anything.”