As colleges’ Early Decision results come out, seniors all over the world are being deferred and rejected. I’m here to tell you that this is completely okay. The college you go to will change the rest of your life, but the attitude you keep will be the final determining factor. If you want to be a writer, go to a school that you want to go to and be a writer. If you want to be an engineer, go to a school that you want to go to and be an engineer. If you want to be a filmmaker, go to a school that you want to go to and be a filmmaker. I understand that most of you have reach schools that you really love and it hurts to think about going anywhere else, but unfortunately, we don’t always get what we want. College admissions officers can’t accept everyone they want to accept. You may be completely qualified to go to that college, but maybe they just didn’t see enough of your personality in your essays. Who knows? It doesn’t matter.

You can still be what you want to be in the future. These four years will pass, and you’ll find yourself with an even more important choice. What do you want to be? What do you want to do for the rest of your life? Even though you didn’t get into that Ivy-league school of your dreams, you can still be successful. You can probably still do what you want to do. It may be harder with a degree from a less-prestigious school, but if you want it enough and work hard enough, you will make it.

It will probably make you feel better knowing that you’re not alone. College students share in your stress, according to Joanne Wu, an author for the Stanford Daily News, who writes “No time for sleep, no time for playing games, no time for going to parties. You must get that six-figure job, you have to get an “A” in this class, and you must succeed. These days, it seems like stress levels are skyrocketing on college campuses, and Stanford is certainly not immune to the pressures of a fast-paced world.”

“I think that the pressures and demands on students have increased in some interesting ways, and students face different challenges,” noted Carole Pertofsky, director of Health Promotion at Cowell Student Health Services.

Furthermore, Joanne provides scientific evidence to back up her claim. “According to a 1999 survey released last month conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the UCLA, 30 percent of freshmen entering college last autumn reported feeling stressed compared to only 16 percent in 1985. Over 260,000 students at 462 colleges contributed to the survey. Much of the stress can be attributed to the changing lifestyles and attitudes of students.”

Check out the rest of this article here!

If you want to know more or read from a more established author, check out this article from the Huffington Post. USA Today writes an excellent article called “Some students feeling college-admission stress.” Click here to read it. Here is an article on Harvard University’s website titled “Stress Less During College Application Season.” Finally, this article contains an interesting letter written to high school seniors from Odyssey author Emily Lahm.