The college application process sucks. Plain and simple. You spent the first half of senior year filling out application after application, writing essay after essay and then send them off into the abyss and wait three agonizing months to get a reply, a reply that will completely alter your life course.

It seems that your entire high school career is focused on getting you into the best college. You are encouraged to join clubs to bolster your activities sheet. You're pushed to take every AP class possible so your transcript is competitive and you can possibly get exempt from some classes in college. You work your butt off for four long years to make sure that you can spend the next four exactly where you want to. But what if it isn't enough?

What if after pouring your entire being into being the best possible candidate for colleges, you still weren't enough. What if everyone around you told you that you had a good shot of getting into that school, but they all turned out to be wrong. What if you had never even imagined actually going somewhere else, but now you're forced to. It all happened to me, and I can promise you, you will survive.

I had applied to 18 schools, yes 18, but I'm not too proud to say I only got into a little more than half of them. Of course all the schools I had actually pictured myself attending fell within that half. March 31st was a brutal day for me. I came home from school to one rejection letter and went off to lacrosse practice with tears in my eyes. I came home and found three more rejections online and the floodgates opened. Nothing I had done in the past four years was worth it. But what could I have done differently? Those rejections meant that I was not good enough. They didn't want me. I had failed.

Come this time of years and sadly a whole bunch of high school seniors are going to be having these same feelings of unworthiness and anger. You're going to question what you could have done better during high school, kick yourself for not editing your essay one more time, and contemplate not going to college at all. I'm here to tell you that all is okay. It is not bad to feel that way, in fact, I would be worried if you didn't. If you got these rejections and let them roll right off your shoulder, were you really invested in that school in the first place? Maybe that was evident in your application and the college passed over you because they want kids that really, truly, want to be there. So spend some days wallowing in self-pity. Let friends bring you coffee to cheer you up, let mom make your favorite dinner, and talk to teacher and guidance counselors about how your feeling.

But by next week, you have to let go. Let go of what you always thought college was going to be like. Let go of your anger and disappointment at yourself at the schools. Let go of your judgment against the other schools you did get into. Let go of your dream school. And pick a new dream school. Visit the ones you did get into and actually pay attention to the tours this time. Research them, ask people about them. Picture yourself going to one of these other schools- scary, I know, but in a few months, it will be a reality. And I promise it will be a pretty damn great reality.

You told me during March of my senior year of high school that I would end of at UNC Chapel Hill, I probably would have laughed at you. Yes, I was already accepted, but it was far off my radar. I had never visited, knew little about it, and did not want to be at a school and plane ride away from home. But here I am, a second-semester sophomore absolutely loving it. Hell, I may even be able to graduate a year early, something I most definitely could not have done at my original dream school.

I've learned during my two years of school that college is less about what school you're at and more about what you do there. It's about what you learn inside the classroom, which honestly is pretty similar across top colleges. It's about clubs and sports and extracurriculars and you will be baffled by the number and variety of in front of you. It's about the people, and you will flock to the same type of people whatever campus you're on because they're "your type" of people. In college, you get what you put in. So I beg you, don't come to your second choice school with a bad attitude. Come as if it was your dream school because, for a lot of people it was and put in just as much effort as you would at any other school, and in time, it will become your dream school.

Good luck and enjoy the rest of senior year because, in my minority opinion, high school is better than any college you could dream of.