- Don’t be jealous of recruited athletes. Definitely delete your Google search history now.
- Embrace the royal “we.” In her Facebook comment section, your mom announces where we’re applying to college and how many schools we’ve gotten into.
- Prepare for college to be brought up thirty-four times in ten minutes at your lunch table. Silently eat your eggloaf sandwich. Resort to talking about the Common App because eggloaf sandwich sucks. Why did you buy that? Weirdo.
- Honey, we didn’t bomb that physics test. Just you.
- Look at your classmates. See fourteen Nobel Peace Prize winners, six Olympians, and Malala, probably. Cry into your copy of Much Ado About Nothing. Too on the nose?
- Decide to become a lawyer after watching Suits.
- Decide to become a doctor after watching Grey’s Anatomy.
- Decide to be unemployed after Googling the salaries of the cast of Dance Moms.
- Write a panicked email to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry after your lab partner gets a recommendation from Harvard’s Chief of Staff. They’ll produce a film titled Varsity Blue Bloods about the experience.
- Start your essays by October of your freshman year. You’ve started too late. Blame your parents for not setting up a Common App account in the delivery room.
- Carefully follow advice on TikTok from certified professionals, and courteously buy their $1200 two-day SAT prep courses.
- All college app accounts on social media are fake handles set up by SFHS Lancers who are out to get you. Ignore them.
- Be the child of Lori Loughlin. Guaranteed a Netflix documentary, a fling with Jacob Elordi, and at least half a bachelor’s degree. #fighton
- Most importantly, fully be yourself in your applications. Actually… be someone else.