So, we’re seniors now. Great! But, whoa! We have to think about college? All of a sudden we have to think about the rest of our lives. Life is no longer set, and education is no longer handed to you on the silver platter of public school. College apps take forever to do, and those minute details that you have to put in are so tedious. But just think about what you are freaking out about for a second. What are you giving up for this unnecessary stress?

Well, let’s see….. A LIFE. You are overwhelming yourself with honors and AP classes, trying to get a perfect score on the SAT, and participating in as many extracurricular activities as possible, while simultaneously breaking the Guinness World Record for the highest number of SSL hours. What are you going to get out of it? The same admission you probably would have gotten if you had done half of that. You probably would have been able to hang out with friends and have an actual childhood. Don’t stress about impressing colleges. You don’t have to go to an Ivy League college to get a job. In fact, most employers don’t even care where you studied.

Some people like to go above and beyond on their college apps, including every activity they have ever done to the point where colleges think that the application is a joke. Sometimes colleges just want someone normal. So, don’t stress about impressing them. Can you imagine the repercussions? You have amazing qualifications to get into a great college, but they think that you’re too idealistic and not unique enough. Or you get into college but can’t read the acceptance letter because you are put in an asylum due to your obsession with admission into Harvard, Yale, or MIT.

When you apply to colleges, be yourself. The key to being yourself is in your essay. Don’t make a hopeless attempt at being the perfectly angelic student, because you will only make a complete and utter fool of yourself. An essay like that would be like those beauty pageant speeches where chicks talk about how their "goal in life is to save the animals and, if they could meet one person, it would be God." That may get the "perfect student" into college, but it won’t get you into college. If you give them an essay about how your goal in life is to rid the world of misogyny because you are a hard-core feminist or about how the one person you would like to meet is Jack White or Marilyn Manson, they’ll know you. If they don’t accept you because of your opinions, then they missed out on an amazing opportunity to meet the coolest person in the world.