7 min read
Malid Fakurian – “An abstract image of a glass of water”
Introduction
As of the time I’m writing this, it’s October 2nd 2025. In just three months (crazy to believe honestly), it will be 2026. If you’re a senior in high school, this is the year that your parents and friends have been talking about for practically your entire life. Even if it was never brought up at family dinner, or watching the newest season of the Walking Dead or Stranger Things, we knew it.
I’ve never really wanted to talk about it. For me it’s a really personal topic -the idea that some day, you’ll end up graduating from high school, essentially the final tier of traditional schooling; and from there, you’ll have to get a job or go to college. And from there, who knows? You might get the job, but you also might just end up working a nearly minimum wage job for 15 years because you didn’t know what else to do.
Not all of us are blessed with help and support from our peers. It’s kind of hard to cope with the fact that the people you see today will never be in your life ever after graduation. That’s it. That’s where the past 18 years of your life led to. That one moment.
So of course, I don’t like talking about it. It doesn’t lift my mood or spirit, but make me upset instead. If anyone knows what it’s like to be extremely nostalgic of a previous memory and never forget it; that’s how I feel.
Hopefully that feeling won’t be as strong after this, for me and for you.
For College Applicants:
There’s the word. “College”. I never liked bringing that up either. I despised ever bringing that up. There’s a good chance you feel the same way “job”, or “j*b”. It’s alright, it’s a sensitive topic at the end of the day.
Anyways, for those of you applying to college, you should know a couple things:
- Recommendation letters – this is a letter given to you by a teacher or counselor. Most colleges expect this (required) from students; ranging from 1-2 letters from teachers, and 1 from your school counselor. These are meant to display the academic ability and opinions of a student from a teacher. If you haven’t already asked for this yet, please DO SO NOW. You were either supposed to ask 2-3 weeks ago from October 1st or at the end of last year.
- FAFSA – this is just federal financial aid to help with paying for college. If your family is in a really bad financial situation, you can naturally pay less and less for college or even nothing at all. This is a long form requiring tax documents and all that other boring stuff that you can find on the official government website when you search “FAFSA”. I’ll link it here too just in case.
- Deadlines – I’ll break this down in just a moment. This’ll take some breakdown.
- College Essay – I will also break this down later.
- SAT/ACT – These are both standardized tests with the purpose of measuring your academic ability without accounting for the unnecessary weight commonly expected from GPAs. For good schools, scores from 1200-1400 are great. For more prestigious and competitive ones, trying going for 1500+ (I only took the SAT so I don’t know for the ACT)
- CSS profile – this is another financial aid application thingy just like FAFSA, except it’s from CollegeBoard
For Non-College Applicants:
Don’t ever feel bad for choosing not to go to college. Most people just go to college because everyone else goes. Others go solely because they’d either be forced to go the military or get kicked out of the house. Choosing college is the easier, but financially destructive path. We don’t all drive down the same road because we have our other preferences.
I would rather not go honestly. However if my goal in life is to pursue a dream that involves me learning engineering (which it is), then college is probably the only appropriate place for me to learn what I need to know. I understand that, but I don’t like it. I’d rather sign up for some other sort of program and pay for classes somewhere else where I know 200 other people won’t be sitting with me in a single room.
Your Options (don’t feel demotivated)
Back to the point, you have a few options:
- Work & Career Paths:
- Trade/Skilled jobs (electrician, plumber, carpenter) – these are the essential, timeless jobs that will always stay until AI robots are deployed, but there’s still plenty of time until then; ideally you go to trade school for this (much better than college for most people)
- Certifications – completing an online or physical course (not school) with respect to your field of interest
- Apprenticeships – get paid while training in a skilled trade or technical field
- Entrepreneurship – launching a business with respect to whatever skill you excel at, not recommended for most people
- Military Service – If you didn’t know already, if you have no idea what to do with the next couple years, I actually would recommend going to the military. They (I’m pretty sure) pay for tuition once you’re out, help you with finding a job, and even other benefits
- On top of that, it gives you the time you need for clarifying what you might want to pursue
- Gap Year (but don’t be that one guy that takes 6 gap years and just loses all their grasp on life) – travel, volunteer, or work; but please, figure out who you are, give yourself time to discover what makes you special
- Internships/Entry-level Jobs – some companies hire really young or give you the shot of working a real-world environment (great for experience)
- Alterative Education – Bootcamps, Online courses, Community College Certificates, or Trade School
My Advice For Either or
I remember seeing this moment I believe in season 5 of Better Call Saul. Amazing show, probably one of the best of all time, according to me and IMDb. I haven’t seen Breaking Bad yet, but I heard BCS was the prequel so I’m not worried.
Anyways, it went something like this (but tweaked by me):
Each of us are on a road. Every decision we take takes us farther down the road or puts us on a new road. Whether it’s a good or bad road is determined by if it was a good or bad decision that led to it. Every decision we make takes us farther down that road.
The point I’m trying to make is that your options now do not dictate where you’ll end up in 10 years. Just because someone has a much nicer car than you, and appears to be going down a much nicer road doesn’t mean anything. You have many different intersections and turns ahead of you. A new road is dictated by a uniquely new choice taken by you.
Realistic Simplification (it’s not as stressing as you think it is)
For me, it was almost as if the moment the end of Junior Year started creeping by, I had to suddenly start caring about my future. For some reason, I need to have a solid plan that defines what I’ll do with the next 5 years of my life, including Senior Year. Why should a 16/17 year old have to deal with that? I’ll never understand why teenagers are expected to be mature and wise enough to make such drastically significant decisions. None of us really know what we want to spend the rest of our lives doing because not all of us has the experience and knowledge we need to make such an education decision.
So, I’ll just simplify things so they don’t appear as scary as you think they are.
Senior year is just another year of high school with an added strap of responsibilities. These responsibilities are just questions asking you what you want to spend the next couple years of your life doing, not the rest of your life. Please remember that. You don’t need to know that yet. For a majority of you, this is just signing up for college by firstly selecting one, applying (lengthy process), and then waiting a couple months.
For the rest of you, this could be community college, trade school, the military, a job, or some other pursuit. Whatever works for you is what matters most.
For college applicants, you just need to know that this stuff is built for you. They know that you aren’t that socially intelligent or even mature at all. There’s a reason freshman in college typically get the earlier classes while juniors and seniors don’t.
No Need To Be Scared (read if you’re going to uni)
If you’re someone who plans on attending a university, just listen:
For the most part, it’s a straightforward and relatively simple process. Not complex by any means, just hard for your brain to wrap itself around. A personal example for me was high school. I never thought I would ever be in high school. I always thought I would be young forever and always be the same kid that was stuck in elementary school. Those years took forever to come to an end, but I only realize now how good I had it.
The point is: high school isn’t hard by any means either. The only difference between high school and elementary school is the difference between both environments (socially for the most part). Schools are bigger, classrooms aren’t as friendly, teachers don’t help out as much, and students are their own person. And in the end, it’s so much better. You’re free and have the ability to do what you want with your time.
College is almost the same exact thing (transition I mean). However, of the three, college is probably the more significant shift. BUT! The good thing is that you gain an almost incomprehensible level of freedom:
- Living space – you no longer live at home with your parents (unless you commute or live close anyways) but in a dorm with another random stranger or more
- Scary at first (completely normal), but normalizes as you get older. You just gotta be the type of person to socialize and talk.
- Food & Transportation – you might use the local bus more often, drive more often (or less), and be completely reliant (on yourself) to get your own food and other stuff
- Discipline – no parents to physically motivate you, leaving you completely self-reliant
Just Another Jump
For me, the hard part is never the lengthy process of creating a common app profile, writing the college essay, asking for recommendations, or whatever else. I’m excluding scholarship sign ups (not hard, just annoying). Instead, for me, the hard part was trying to conceive the change. How would I be able to make the shift from practically staying at home all the time to moving to a new area hours away from home, live with strangers, learn on my own, meet new people, make strong connections, and whatever other bs. It’s too much for my small brain.
But then again, I couldn’t do the same for high school. I couldn’t do the same for driving a car. I just can’t see myself doing it, but, once you kind of force your mind to learn and try something new; that once scary thing becomes fun. It becomes enjoyable.
The jump is quite literally just any other jump that you’ve already made in your lifetime. Maybe you felt the same way about middle school, but then again, how did it go? Sure, maybe not smooth at all, but you turned out fine.
My Simplified Explanation of the College Essay + Important Deadlines
The College Essay is the most important essay you will ever write in your life if you don’t plan on becoming a professional writer. A good essay will get you into a school your SAT, ecs, and GPA couldn’t have gotten you into. It shows character, personality, and other traits important for assessing how you’ll perform at their college.
There are a collection of prompts you can answer with respect to this essay. You can find them in the “writing” section once you log into your common app account.
These prompts are really easy (on paper) to answer since they’re all judging based on your personal experiences. However, this isn’t just some typical high school English class; so, you’re expected of much more. You need to write a piece so impactful, so unique, and so memorable that the university just has to accept you.
Not everyone can write that way. Not everyone is an S-tier writer. I’m not. So it’s important to be unique with your essay, but to write in a way that doesn’t overdo anything. Be creative and try and be as different as you can be with your writing style. Attack a problem that isn’t just like every other story everyone’s heard of. But if you’re just overdoing that “different”, it will only hurt your essay’s delivery. Your essay is meant to show who YOU are. Why should you attend their university?
Where To Write Your Essay
- I started writing mine in a google doc and then wrote it (not pasted) into the common app essay section.
- Search up “CommonApp”
- Log in (you should have an account set up already from Junior Year – if not, please make one, it’s urgent)
- Find the “writing” section (it’s the last of the whatever number of steps) –> you will easily find it, it’s in a box
- Write your essay
Again, you can choose if you want to write your essay directly into the box, or start in a google doc. It’s up to you.
Deadlines To Watch Out For
- Early Action – This is the ability to apply to universities early. This makes you look more serious and prepared than students applying for regular decision, but won’t really increase your chances all that much. This lets you apply to multiple schools, and see which ones might offer more aid than others before confirming. The deadline is November 1st.
- Early Decision – This is applying to one school, and being forced to go if you are accepted. This is a binding agreement unlike early action. However, the upside is that your chances of attending that university increase a fair amount. The deadline is November 1st.
- Regular Decision – This is the normal application for university, with chances being regular as they are. The deadline is somewhere in January. So, you have a few months more to decide, but requests usually end up clogging everything due to the volume of people that apply during this season. Your chances remained unchanged.
Conclusion
I really don’t think high school students should be put with the burden of deciding what they want to spend the rest of their lives doing. So, I decided to change it up a bit, and really open your eyes. College doesn’t decide what you’ll do for the rest of your life. It doesn’t have to. For most people, sure, it does. But if you take control of your destiny and future, only your mind and soul can decide what exit on the highway of life to take.
