If you thought junior year was hard, try having to balance schoolwork, college applications, sports, and a social life during senior fall.
Nov. 1, the early-action deadline for most colleges, is just around the corner. Seniors must write one 650-word college essay, often accompanied by numerous, highly-specific individual supplements required by each school.
As college application deadlines approach, many Williston seniors are lacking free time. School itself takes up seven hours of students’ days; add two hours of sports, two hours to eat and shower, often up to three hours of homework, plus the recommended eight to nine hours of sleep, and students are left with about two hours of spare time. Two hours which are often taken up by club meetings and other commitments.
With this nonstop schedule, seniors are finding it nearly impossible to make time for college work.
Senior Abby Muscato finds she is most stressed about the number of Williston students applying to the same schools..
“Everyone is trying to get into colleges and there are some that overlap,” she said. “This gives a sense of competition with who is going to get in and who is not.”
Abby is applying to 18 schools, including ASU, FSU, UCF, American University, George Washington University, UVA, and Auburn, and has already heard back from three.
Many students do not have enough time during the day to write their college supplements, so they have resorted to staying up late to work on them. This has caused a loss of valuable hours of rest they need to function during the day.
According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, teenagers should be sleeping between 8-10 hours per night.
Abby Muscato and Katya Krasnovkaya, another senior, both said they have recently only been getting five to six hours of sleep on weekdays. This results in them oversleeping on weekends to catch up on their sleep schedules.
Nadim Smaira, a senior varsity basketball player from Dubai, has fallen behind on sleep due to his extreme daily schedule.
“Although I work hard and try my best to balance everything I need to get done during the day, I usually end up staying up late and losing sleep in order to finish my work,” Nadim said.
In the past, junior year typically held the reputation of being the most challenging high school year. But since many seniors have added more rigorous AP courses to their schedules compared to their junior year, this is no longer the case for many.
Katya is one of the students who is a victim of a difficult senior fall.
“Senior fall has 100% been harder than my entire junior year combined,” she said. “I feel like a lot of work that I am doing for school is just meaningless since I spend all my time just stressing about college. The thought of college is just mentally draining.”
Nadim, like most seniors, uses the small amount of free time he has to work on his college application.
“Usually, I use my free blocks to work on my college applications and after study hall once I finish all my work,” he said. “I try to spend as much time as I can on my application, which has led me to have very little free time.”
Not only are students missing out on sleep and valuable down time, but also are conflicted with finding time to be social and have fun with friends.
Katya has found she has very little time to be social with all of the time she spends on work.
“Two hours of study hall are not enough to complete all my schoolwork, and at some point in the night I need to go to bed,” she said. “Sometimes I have to sacrifice the time with my friends and miss out on social events in order to do my work.”
With application cutoff dates approaching, seniors need to stay focused on submitting their applications and keeping up with their schoolwork. To help, Williston offered a college workshop day on Oct. 12 in hopes of relieving some student stress.
Abby hopes teachers will be more cautious with the amount of work they give to seniors in the days surrounding deadlines.
“I think that if the school would have teachers assign less homework around application deadline dates it would be helpful,” she said. “Having to do not only the Common App essay but also multiple supplementary questions for each school gets very stressful and means I have to stay up super late. which has had negative consequences for me.”
Emily McDowell, Director of College Advising, urges students to break their college work into small chunks and go to college counseling if they need support.
“Make sure you do a little bit each day and remember [you] have a lot of resources at [your] disposal,” McDowell said.