As many of us seniors tentatively hover our cursors over the future-determining burgundy “Submit” button on the Common Application, we wonder if there is a missing semi-colon somewhere in our essays. Even though we could probably recite our essays backwards due to the sheer number of proofreads, there is still an urge to check one more time.

If you had asked me six months ago what I thought about the college application process, I would probably have sprawled on the floor and shielded my face from your questions in an attempt to escape the uncertainness of my future.

Look into myself and write about myself? Yeah, no thanks. For someone who doesn’t enjoy boasting, I thought it would be incredibly hard to fashion myself in a grandiose manner. But even after the application process, I know the suspense of finding out the results will eat me up. And who even knows what my reaction to the letter’s contents will be?

Of course, I still have those reservations, but for now, I’ll try to focus on the present. As I was printing out the final product of my application, I noticed how few pages the printer gave to me. I had printed out nine sheets of black and white. Those nine pages were the accumulation of the things I’d done throughout my four years in high school. To put that in perspective, it was shorter than my history research paper, and I only spent a month on that.

And I realized that all they were going to see was summed up in that pile that will never hold everything I want to mention. They would make a decision off of what they had read, and six months ago, I would have let them decide whether my next four years of my life would be made or broken.

I won’t let the knowledge I’ve accumulated and what I’ve worked for the entirety of my high school career be determined by the scrutiny of a small summary of it all. The ratio of how much time I put into building myself, mentally developing and being introspective just won’t be proportionate to the level of scrutiny placed on my application.

It’s like they say, “Numbers do not define you.” College admission officers will only see around a dozen pages of the hundreds I’ve written and am writing throughout high school.