It’s that time of year that every single senior in high school has to go through: the college application process. Many of these applications start before the school year and are due by the end of the year. Students are either applying to Texas universities through applytexas.org or other out-of state universities through commonapp.org.

However, the process of applying to countless colleges is easier said than done. Besides requiring school transcripts, ACT/SAT test scores, essays, and resumes, some of these colleges also require teacher recommendations, SAT subject test scores, and personal interviews. This can cause a lot of stress for students.

“The whole application process was really unexpected for me,” Vina Pham ’15 said. “I wasn’t expecting a lot the deadlines to be really early.”

“For example, a lot of the schools that had early decision available had their deadlines by Nov.1,” Pham said. “This made it really stressful to get all of the documents ready because the deadline came too soon.”

“The hardest part of the application process for me was getting teacher recommendations,” Frank Chen ‘15 said.

“I waited too long to get them when I should have started to ask teachers at the end of junior year,” said Chen. “If I had done that, the teachers who I asked would have had more time to write the letters, and the letters would be in better quality.”

Although college applications may seem tedious and demanding for many students, some students have an easier time completing them.

“It really isn’t that difficult to do them,” Tianrun Ma’15 said. “It didn’t take that long for me to write the essays because I started in the summer, and because of that, I was able to submit almost all of my applications in the first month of school.”

Altogether, the college application process is busy and has a lot of components to it. It can be stressful to many seniors but the stress can also be overrated to others seniors.