What am I thankful for?
What am I thankful for? There’s a lot; I could say I’m thankful for an education, supportive friends and family, or the internet. While those topics are important, they’re a bit too cliche and boring.
I’m thankful for college apps to be over soon. It’s too much writing and too many drafts. It’s hard to summarize 5 years of your life into a few 250 to 550 word essays. Well, it’s not terrible, but getting started is rough. Going through the whole brainstorming process and writing down notes, trying to remember things that happened a while ago, it’s not fun. With deadlines ages away I sometimes find myself slacking off until 2 to 3 weeks before the deadline as I always think “hey this due date is far away I don’t have to worry about it”. At least once you have a few written out, you can recycle quite a few essays.
Besides essays, some application portals are terribly designed. The University of California portal is so finicky. I also wish all colleges were on the Common app. At least it’s not as confusing as the UC one. That also reminds me, having to input every course and grade into each portal is so annoying. Why can’t you just use our high school transcripts? I know it’s not standardized, but it would save so much time and result in zero errors and less confusion.
There’s also the financial aid information and sending in test scores after submitting your application. Financial aid is irritating; schools require the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student aid), and the website itself is slow. Adding on, if you need to add more than 10 schools, you have to process your current FAFSA form, start a new one, remove those 10 schools, add more, then process. And some private schools require the CSS profile, an additional form (although more simplified than the FAFSA) where you have to upload certain documents like tax forms.
So yeah, I’m thankful college apps are almost done. As for now, it’s just holding out for another week or so for the early round of decisions to come out. We’ll see how that goes.
Never a truer thing has been said. Godbless the end of college apps. You are especially right on getting started being awful and the pain of everything not being on common app. Well to be fair this is all true.
ReplyDeleteI agree. This has been and will continue to be a constant stressor in my life. I can't be thankful yet though. There is still a month more of deadlines in the distance. What a true and relatable blogpost. Very true.
ReplyDeleteI can't relate to this post just yet, but I can definitely feel the pain in your words. I knew college apps were super unfun, but it really seems like there's a lot of parts of it that can be made a lot easier. Maybe I'll come back to this post in a year when I'm venting about the same things.
ReplyDeleteCompletely agree. Theres too much to do on too many different websites. If everything's gonna go to all these colleges, why can't they just consolidate everything that we need to submit into one portal/place. Like we doing enough work brainstorming and note taking and essay writing like you said, they could make it a little easier on us lol.
ReplyDelete100% agree, while the process was a learning experience for many of us, it's a great thing to finally have them done and feel accomplished. Common app is actually really confusing to use they really need to make it more user friendly somehow.
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