You’ve received your college acceptances, and you’ve sent back out a letter to your college of choice – you’ve finally ended the admissions process! You have your college! You know where you’re headed next year! It’s an amazing feeling!
So…what should you do next?
1. Relax a bit!
You’re into college! You’ve made your decision! You’ve earned yourself a bit of a respite. Take some time to just bask in your success. All that hard work earlier in the year? It’s paid off!
2. Make sure everything’s in order!
After you take your break, you’ll want to check over everything related to your acceptance. Make sure you know when the check needs to get in, and make sure that it does. Make sure your college has all the paperwork it needs from you, and if it doesn’t, make sure that you get that paperwork in. And so on, and so forth. There’s probably still plenty of administrative stuff to manage to make sure you’re all set, and you don’t want this whole process to be derailed now, not when the finish line is so close.
3. Thank everyone!
Thank your teachers, especially if they wrote recommendations for you. Thank your parents for all the help they gave you. Thank anyone else who wrote a recommendation for you or let you list them as a reference. Thank your guidance counselor for, well, guiding you throughout this process. Thank everyone who gave you a leg up and got you here today.
4. Keep working!
It can be incredibly tempting to just let go of your high school studies now. You’ve gotten into college, after all – that was the whole point of this high school thing, right? Now that you’re there, you don’t need to keep doing calculus, right? Not so much. Colleges will still be watching your grades, even after you’re accepted, and if you start slipping you might find that acceptance flipping around on you. Plus, it’s still a good idea to pay attention throughout the rest of the year, just for the sake of actually learning.
5. Think about your summer!
What’re you going to do during the summer? It’s not as important a question as where you’re going to college, but it’s still worth spending some time on. Maybe you’ve already lined up some program or internship, but even if you haven’t, there’s still time to try to do so. It’s up to you whether or not you want to spend the summer enjoying your last gasps of high-school-life, relaxing a bit before plunging into college, or whether you want to spend it working and give yourself a leg up on your studies ahead. Either way, though, spend some time considering what your summer is going to look like.
6. Look ahead to college!
More than just being excited and looking forward to college, you’ll want to start looking ahead to college in terms of practical realities. Planning what you’ll need to bring, how you’re going to get there, how you’re going to pack, and so on. You’re not under any kind of immediate stress to answer all those questions right this second, but that’s partly why you should start thinking about it now – the earlier you do start planning ahead, the less stressful it’ll be on the whole.
7. Enjoy the rest of senior year!
This is it! Your last year of high school! Enjoy it! (That doesn’t mean enjoy it so much that it throws you off your studies – see point #4.) Relish graduation, and any other graduation-related activities that might be going on. Have fun with your friends. This should be a good and happy, if somewhat bittersweet, time for you, and you should appreciate that.
