Applying to college can be one of the most stressful things you will ever do in your high school years.

Most people dread the month of October due to the fact that they know it’s the time they now actually have to put forth an effort to get into another school.

To be honest it just doesn’t sound fun when it comes down to it, having to answer a bunch of random stupid questions and filling out standard boring information about yourself. Then the couple hundred word essays that are pretty much your determining factor whether you stand out as an individual and will be accepted or not.

Once you have chosen the school of your choice, my advice to those applying in the future would be to really try to stand out in a couple different ways.

One way would be when talking in your essays try to brag about yourself and your accomplishments or depending on your questions answer them with your best effort and thought possible. Two would be to put as much volunteer and extracurricular activity information down about yourself as possible. These are some of the main factors that make you stand out as an individual rather than a student when answering the essay questions.

My third advice would be to go on a college campus tour or set up a meeting with an admissions counselor at that school. This could be the best thing you’ve ever done just because you get a full breakdown of the college experience by an admissions counselor. You get to see what kind of places you would be staying in on campus, all the different housing options that school has as well as the different types of classes they have to offer for each and every degree available.

They also share with you all the different kinds of extra events and activities you can be a part of outside of class.

I did all of this in my personal experience when applying and I know it really helped me. A student from Milford high school also had the same experience and when asked how visiting the school helped him this was his response:

Nik Hegg says, ¨Going on a campus tour and talking with students that went there really helped me get a look at what living on campus would be like and it definitely help me with my choice. I would highly recommend for anybody interested in a school to go and visit the campus it can really help.”

By visiting the campus and signing up to do one of these options a file was made in my name as well as Nik´s that way when we went to apply at the school of our choice they would get back to us faster than most because of the fact they already knew we we´re interested. It worked, Nik and I were both accepted and received a letter of acceptance not even a full three weeks later.

Working on an application little by little can make things a lot easier than jumping into it all at once. Everyone works at different speeds but it’s up to you to want to move on to the next chapter of your educational career and it all starts with giving a little time and effort of filling out an application. An extremely helpful website to visit that can help you plan out the steps of your application process can be found at be bigfuture.collegeboard.org.