The first semester of senior year of high school is filled with applications, essay writing and immense amounts of stress as a new class begins to apply for college. As January rolls around, the end seems near, and it is, but the end prompts a new beginning of a long waiting game called second semester. Once college decisions are rolled out, tides change from anxiety filled work to impatience and excitement for fall. During this time, seniors begin to obsess over their future home and their new found future begins to take over their lives. To “prepare” themselves for the fall, seniors fill their time with a variety of tasks including:

1. Losing all of the motivation and study skills they had built up during high school

It’s the classic illness that seems to plague all high school seniors: senioritis. Though students often claim to have said illness earlier in their high school careers, senioritis comes in full force as soon as students are accepted into their first college. Common symptoms include an extreme lack of motivation, procrastination, staying up later and sleeping later, a growing love for sweatshirts, and a constant desire to skip class. Studying and staying up late to do homework are things of the past. Grades drop and teachers become more frustrated.

2. Buying gear

As soon as seniors commit to their future school they buy gear, and, often, a lot of it. Stickers from their new schools begin to appear on water bottles, cars, and computers. More and more college t-shirts and sweatshirts line the halls at school. Gifts for family members often incorporate school colors or logos because of course, your family has to have school pride as well.

3. Commenting and posting in your future class’s Facebook group

Snapchat and Instagram usernames will be shared at least ten times, hobbies and future majors will be compared, and shared excitement and nervousness will be expressed. This is the first time seniors will be interacting with some of their future best friends, so sharing more helps find more people who could possibly be in that inner circle of friends later.

4. Joining every possible GroupMe they can find

In the first few weeks of joining the class Facebook group, smaller communities will emerge and thus more and more GroupMes will be created. There will be one for the whole school, one for each subject or internal school, one for each major, groups for pre-orientation programs, boys groups, girls groups, and dorm groups. These seem fun at first, but soon chaos will emerge. After a few weeks, the constant changing topic and thousands of notifications will eventually lead to a slow demise of these groups and senior’s motivation to continue participating.

5. Binge watching college videos on Youtube

With the unknown that comes with starting college, comes thousands of videos that are meant to help incoming freshmen understand what the next four years of their lives will be like. Watching dorm halls, advice videos, dorm tours, and CollegeHumor videos are all attempts to understand what to expect in the coming year. Likely, seniors will have several of these in their viewer history by the time they begin packing for college.

6. Dorm shopping way too early and buying way too much

The excitement of college comes with the opportunity to completely redo your room. Because of this, seniors browse Target, Dormify, Dormitup, and Bed Bath and Beyond before even knowing where they’ll be living. When it finally comes time to buy what they need, upcoming freshmen often buy everything they could possibly need. Ten different types of storage? Why not? A miniature iron? You never know! A package of 300 felt hangers? I mean I’m bringing a lot of clothes.