Dear high school seniors who just applied to college and are now hearing back,

First off, congratulations! You went through months of work and probably spent a LOT of money to get to the situation you are in right now. It does take a lot out of you! You requested and submitted transcripts, racked your brains to make sure you had all of your extracurricularevents on there, and did the daunting task of asking your most trusted teachers for letters of recommendation and now you are finally hearing back. The feeling of waiting is terrible and you know it. The feelings of getting those letters and finding what is inside is just as intense, whether it is the over the moon feeling of getting accepted or the crushing feelings of being rejected. If you were rejected, it is very easy to feel like you are worthless or not good enough. I know the feeling all too well, I was in your shoes just last year! I applied to an ungodly amount of schools (a 'record' of 26 or 27, many of which were free applications I was convinced to fill out!) and heard back from all except for one (which is a different story for a different day, and what I now file under a rejection). I was accepted into quite a few of them, but also rejected from a lot of them, some of which I thought I had great chances for and was a shoe in for acceptance. I thought I would be happy no matter where I got in or didn't get in but that first rejection stung a LOT more than I thought it would. When I got rejected from one school I ended up crying in my car! You may now think that this experience of acceptance and rejection defines you, especially hearing your friends stories of where they got in and didn't. This experience doesn't at all define who you are whatsoever! The process is one that is highly selective and cutthroat. For example, Claremont McKenna in the year I applied for it only accepted between 350-375 people for their freshman class the next fall. That is only 50 -100 people more than what my graduating class in high school was! I was crushed by this but realized that everyone around me was also getting the same news from schools as well and it wasn't just me feeling this way. Lift your friends and classmates up and support each other as those telltale letters and emails come to inboxes and mailboxes. Bond over schools you all applied to and find excitement in getting the letters. Talk to your trusted teachers and ask them about what their application experience was like and if and how they dealt with rejection. This process isn't a fun one and I don't think anyone goes through this and says everything was without a doubt the most fun part of school and it was fun. It is a tough time for the waiting game and hearing back. You are not what a piece of paper from a college says you are. Colleges look at a piece of paper and attempt to visualize a person based on what it says and try to fit them into the overall scheme of the university. You are an actual living person with qualities that you can't write on a piece of paper and send to a school and are so much more than what was on that piece of paper they looked at. I thought rejection meant that I wasn't worth enough for the school when in reality the pool of applicants were people just like me and decisions had to be made without meeting every applicant and judging that piece of paper, like I said earlier. Don't beat yourself up too much about that rejection, know you are worth so much more than what a college says. Any school that you go to is lucky to have you, no matter what.

From,

Someone who faced rejection, a LOT