Every year, seniors experience the grueling, stressful college application process. What’s it like to endure this seemingly daunting undertaking? What should those of us who still have to go through it need to be thinking about?

As Senior Abe Ezra explained, applying to college is no simple task, but organization and preparation are key when it comes to meeting deadlines and keeping track of all the moving parts.

Q: How would you generally describe your college admissions process so far?

A (Ezra): It was kind of a slow start. I started over the summer, so I had to get into the mindset of writing college essays, which are very different from essays that we write in class because you have to brag, but humbly, and every school is looking for something different. Then, going up to the EA/ED (Early action/early decision) deadline, it started moving really fast, and then kind of slowed down a little bit again in November and December.

Q: How much work is it to submit to each college? How many essays did you have to write in total?

A: For a lot of schools, you can use the same essay and kind of just tweak it a little bit. I wrote my Common App and UC essays first. There’s four UC essays and one Common App essay. One of my schools was not on the Common App, so I was able to use my Common App essay for one of their essays without really changing it, and I was able to build out my UC essays with specifics about other schools. Some schools famously have unique questions, and so you have to do research for a couple of schools and talk about the departments there and professors you want to study with. All in all, I wrote a lot of essays, but I can’t remember the exact amount.

Q: So for the specific applications, you can’t really recycle essays because they have to be unique to each school?

A: Right. And then there’s this thing called the white out test where, theoretically, if you replace the name of the school in your essay with a blank spot, someone should still be able to tell what school it’s about.

Q: How were you able to balance schoolwork, which, as a senior, certainly isn’t a light load, with your college applications?

A: When I have a day or weekend that is light on work, or during my free period first thing in the morning as long as I don’t have a lot of homework the night before, that can be a good time to work on essays. It really depends. Obviously for the schools you really care about, you want to constantly be working on those and making sure the essays are the best they can be before you submit.

Q: Approximately how many schools did you apply to?

A: 18, but four or five of them were UCs, which was one application.

Q: What’s the average amount of schools people apply to as a senior?

A: Anecdotally, I would say probably around that same amount (18). It depends because if you’re applying to any UCs, that’s all one application, so you can apply to more schools than applications you send in. But I’d say generally between 12-18.

Q: What types of things do you take into consideration when selecting which schools you are interested in applying to?

A: I really wanted to go to school in the city. I’m a city kid. Basically every school that I applied to was in a big city because that’s the environment that I want. I applied to a couple smaller schools and a couple bigger schools but most of them are mid-sized in terms of student population.

Q: What are you interested in studying?

A: If I end up in DC, international relations. If not, either English or maybe sound design.