The only thing that could pale in comparison to the stress of junior year is the first half of senior year, aka college application season. It is essentially 5-6 months of essay work, teacher recommendations, and last-minute testing on top of the school you already have. However, because of COVID-19 multiple changes have been made to this year’s application process.

To contextualize this year’s application process to seniors, these applications have been open since around early August, that’s over a month ago! About half of the common app, the main place where students apply to college, is just filling out basic information that only takes about an hour maximum. Despite this, colleges do ask a lot of applicants, with a 650 word overall Common App essay, extracurriculars plus explanation, and then possible supplemental essays depending on the college. For example, the University of Florida, whose application is due November 1, requires four supplemental questions for applicants to further explain some of the activities and jobs that are on their resume. And for the people aiming for honors college, there are two additional essays to write.

This year there have been many new changes for the college application process. The Common App has added an optional essay to explain how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the applicants, whether that be academically, socially, or personally. This section is mostly beneficial if you feel that you can help explain your specific situation as a result of the pandemic. It is pretty well known that for this application cycle many colleges around the country have become test-optional, but according to https://www.fairtest.org/university/optional (a site that lists all the colleges going test-optional this year), but it should be known to everyone applying to the major Florida colleges (UF, UCF, FSU, etc.) that most of them have not made their applications test-optional, but that is always up for change. 

But the real question is what does this all mean for seniors this year? Seniors should be ready and prepared to start applying for colleges, and despite all the craziness that is happening in the world, these colleges are still expecting so much from students and should just try their best to better themselves by continuing their education in any way possible.