November 1st, the deadline for early admission and the date that has been drilled into the heads of every senior at UDJ, has finally arrived. For the past month, seniors have been making their applications, writing essays, and stressing over the process as a whole. Now that this date has passed, what was this time like for the seniors? How did UDJ help them during this whole process?

UDJ’s main resource for helping with college applications is the College Counseling Office located on the base floor of the school. There, the college counselor Ms. Toles can be found in her office. In her 5 years at the school, she has helped over 300 students with their applications also saying, “it blows my mind that I’ve helped that many Cubs”.

Her overall job is to assist students in all aspects of the application process, such as researching colleges, choosing what test to take, completing the application, reading over essays, financial aid, and ultimately helping students make their final decision. Nowadays, the whole process is done online on the site Common App, which is much easier than it used to be. “College applications are now all online. When I applied, only paper applications were available, meaning I had to write my information multiple times for each school. Now students can complete the Common App online once and they’re done!” said Ms. Toles.

Now, just because the process has become much easier over the years, doesn’t mean it’s not still challenging. UDJ senior, AJ McMullan, used one word to describe the whole process, that word being “Stressful”. So far, McMullan has applied to 16 colleges, with his dream ones being either U of M or NCAT where he is looking to go into either cybersecurity or business. Ms. Toles has been a “great help” to him during this time, helping him form a plan for his submission process and writing him a letter of recommendation.

Now, on the other hand, McMullan said he does feel that UDJ could’ve pushed more incentive for working on applications. “I feel like UDJ could’ve helped more by stressing the idea of working on your applications, specifically your personal essay, over the summer. I procrastinated and waited until the last minute to do most things required for applications”. He also commented on the fact that he has heard from UDJ graduates who said that their time at the high school prepared them for college. “I’ve heard from a lot of graduates of UDJ that it makes college easy.” AJ McMullan is a perfect example of what it’s like during application season for seniors at UDJ, a stressful experience that, for the most part, UDJ prepares its students for and helps them through.

In a poll taken amongst UDJ seniors, it was found that most of them found this process to be very stressful. With all the work they had to do, this makes sense. Writing essays, sending in information, filling out lots of forms, and more, the seniors had their hands full, but most of them also said that with UDJ’s resources, they had plenty of help available to them. With all the people in the counseling office readily available to help, any senior that needed it, had it.

Now that the deadline for early admission has passed, seniors can take a bit of a breather and focus back on their schoolwork and activities again.