Come every fall, it’s a pretty common sight to see seniors with dark eye bags, hunching over their computers. They’re hard at work on college essays, scholarship applications, SAT/ACT prep, and writing supplementals, the list goes on. And all this done while balancing a senior year course load and extracurriculars.

Then, until early decisions in December and regular decisions in March, students wait with bated breath as the seemingly most important results of their lives come out through confetti-filled emails.

In this first edition of College Chronicles, a series dedicated to the college application experience, we explore how students cope with the stress they face when starting their application process.

A 2022 survey by The Princeton Review reported that 74% of students surveyed felt high stress about college applications. We talked to one of our own students here at Granby, and she offered insight into some reasons for her worries and pressures.

Kayla McQuiller is our senior class president and also is involved in softball, Granby medical club, and outside jobs. She has committed to NYU for softball.

Despite all of her accomplishments, McQuiller told us that she feels the “need to keep fighting for [wins] so I don’t disappoint my family. I can acknowledge that it’s a little wrong to think like that, but it gets harder with pressure.”

She describes how she carries a heavy burden after receiving encouragement and praise for her softball accomplishments, as she felt that she had a new standard to maintain and even upstage.

The line between pressure and encouragement can easily get blurred when it comes from family. While family and friends can keep you accountable and motivated, they can unintentionally become an added stressor.

So how can we deal with this? Stress is a natural part of life, only exacerbated by all the additional things on our plate in senior year. But that doesn’t mean we’re just bound to suffer throughout all our high school years, right?

To dive deeper into how we should tackle this issue, we sat down with Ms. Kirby and Ms. Singleton, two of Granby’s school counselors.

A common worry that students have, they said, when starting the college application process, is narrowing down their list and figuring out where exactly to start. Singleton described it perfectly with the old saying, “When the world is your oyster, how do you find your pearl?”

(Spoiler: we’ll be covering that in our next installment.)

We asked them what advice they’d give students who feel overwhelmed by the stress from balancing college applications and schoolwork.

“Always have something to make you happy,” Kirby said, “if you have something in your life that makes you happy, it makes it easier.”

Like McQuiller who found solace in the stress with her joy in softball and hanging out with family and friends at her games and practices, it’s important to have a constant during these stressful times—anything to keep you grounded and can provide comfort.

“My friends/family coming to my games, surprising me at practices, or just even sitting in a room with me, means the world to me in a way I cannot describe,” McQuiller said.

Whether it be staying present in the moment with friends and family, or carving out a dedicated time each day to a hobby that you’ve put on the back burner, make sure to not take for granted the little moments that can ease the burden and stress of your journey.

With these constants, tackling college applications and school stress as a whole might not seem as big an obstacle to face.

This was the second installment of our series dedicated to helping students navigate the college application process. Look forward to our next edition, which will focus on how students can find their right fit college.