During my first three years of high school, I’d hear seniors talking about college application deadlines, essays, and rejections. Their evident stress terrified me: I’m horrible with deadlines, I’m horrible with micromanagement, I’m horrible with staying organized. My mom, being well aware of these traits, got me a college counselor my junior year.
It’s now December of my senior year, and I’m not stressed at all. My applications were all finished by August and submitted by October. Everything is now out of my hands, and I thankfully haven’t had to open the Common App website in weeks. All of that was only made possible by my college counselor.
I view my college counselor as my fairy godmother, and I assumed that other people viewed theirs in the same way. To my surprise, I’ve learned that some people strongly dislike their college counselor, or are happy they don’t have one. I cannot imagine.
I believe the first thing that makes my college counselor so amazing is her location. Being based so close, we’re able to meet in person at different coffee shops and restaurants, which is far better than meeting over Zoom. Sitting with her, drinking our coffee as we scroll through Common App is way better than speaking through Zoom. From meeting face-to-face, we’ve formed a true connection, and using that connection, she was able to help me search for different colleges that she thought fit me. I also have grown close to her as a person, our conversations veering towards different TV shows we’re watching or places we’re traveling. I never imagined myself actually looking forward to any meeting, let alone a college-related one.
In the spring of my junior year, during the very beginning of our sessions together, my college counselor mapped out how the next few months would look for me. We set timely goals and figured out how often we should meet in order to stay on track. Having a set schedule minimized my stress. If things went according to our plan, I’d be done submitting everything by the end of October.
Spoiler alert, I was.
Many people know exactly where they want to go to college in their freshman year of high school. I was not that person. I had zero clue where I wanted to go, what I wanted to major in, or what I wanted to do post college. Luckily, my college counselor helped me with that. She asked me about different things, such as location, social life, sports, majors I was interested in, and my weather preferences. Taking note of my likes and dislikes, she brought up many schools for me to look into, and then we narrowed it down to my final list. I didn’t even know about half of the schools — including the one I’m currently committed to — on that list before she told me about them. Having someone point you in the right direction is quite helpful for the students who didn’t plan their entire lives out when they were 14.
After opening the acceptance letter from my dream school, I immediately reached out to my college counselor, thanking her. Due to our routine in-person meetings, college-searches, essay planning and editing, and extensive fine-tuning of my applications, I’m committed to a college in December; I get to have a stress-free end of my senior year, which is all my junior-year-self had hoped for.
