You did it. You submitted your application to the University of Florida before November 15. Now for the harder part: waiting. While perfecting and submitting your application might have seemed like it’d never end, waiting to hear back from UF about your acceptance is ten times more agonizing.
Stage 1: Relief
Completing your application and hitting that “submit” button is one of the most satisfying feelings of the whole college application process. I know that I went back and read, reread, got my friends to read and got my parents to read my essay at least 100 times before deciding it was ready to submit. As I hit the “submit” button, I felt a wave of relief wash over me because there was nothing else I could do now — although I still probably reread the essay a few more times just because I couldn’t resist.
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Stage 2: The Next Day
Think you can stop thinking about your application now? Think again. That sigh of relief is followed by high anxiety while at school the next day. Anyone who wants to go to UF talks about his or her applications non-stop the next day. “Which essay question did you choose?” “What did you write about?” “What kind of leadership positions did you have on your resume?” These questions will be coming at you every hour of the torturous 7-hour school day, making it impossible to put the application out of your mind.
Stage 3: The Waiting Game
After the initial few days pass, college application-related talk will subside. Now you just have to deal with the internal mental breakdowns every few weeks. Among the overwhelming feeling of senioritis, you will get random bursts of “Oh my god, what am I doing with my life!?” With three months of waiting, you’ll learn how to deal with these freakouts, but don’t expect them to be fun.
Stage 4: Other College Decisions Come Out
One of the best parts about wanting to go to the University of Florida is that their application decisions come out after almost all other universities! (Can you sense my sarcasm?) While waiting the three excruciating months for UF to FINALLY release their decisions, you will easily get accepted to a few schools you don’t actually care about (cough, cough, Florida State), see everyone else decide where they will be attending college and have a few more mental breakdowns.
Stage 5: The Day Of
Your alarm goes off just like any other day. Except this isn’t just any other day. It’s decision day. If this year’s decisions are anything like the year I was accepted, UF will make you wait until 5 p.m. to find out the fate of your future. Going through the school day with all the decision talk will make it even harder to put it out of your mind, and then the two hours waiting after school for the decisions to come out feel like the longest two hours of your life. You’re about to find out something that will determine which path your life will take, and that’s huge.
Stage 6: The Decision
The clock strikes 4:59 p.m. It’s almost time, so you have the Web page pulled up. Your mom sits by your side with her arm around you, rubbing you comfortingly. The time in the upper right-hand corner of your computer screen now turns to 5:00 p.m., and you immediately start entering your username and password, heart beating rapidly. There’s only one word you know you need to look for: “Congratulations!” As the Web page loads, your heart beats even faster, and then you see it… or you don’t.
Although I can only speak from my own experience of feeling what it’s like to see “congratulations” on that screen, the reality is that only about 38 percent of applicants will feel this joy and relief. However, everyone waiting on that decision has to understand that it isn’t going to either make or ruin your whole life. While I do wholeheartedly believe that I go to the best school in the nation, UF isn’t for everyone. Maybe I’m just a believer in fate, but opening your UF decision (after the many stages of waiting) will change the path of your life one way or another, yet everything works out exactly how it’s supposed to.