Hey, you. Take a second to breathe.

Don’t worry so much. This whole application process is basically designed to weed out students who don’t want it as badly as you do. This entire scheme, this government plot, is supposed to test your academic stamina and determination. The students who open up Common App and go, “Nope,” are not your people. The people who look at the personal essay prompts and think, “Well, I guess I’m not that interesting, after all,” are not your people. You are the kind of student who looks at these God-awful measuring sticks and smiles at the inkling of a challenge.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

We all feel it. The urge to impress. The need to be accepted, understood, related to in some way. But if they read your essay and don’t like you, beautiful and smart and kind and witty and funny you, then you can rest assured that those admissions officers weren’t your people either. You will find your people somewhere else. The college admissions officers who read your essay and understand that (1) you are a student under a lot of pressure to woo them and (2) that you have many valuable qualities to bring to their school will give you their acceptance letter. And those are the colleges you want to go to. Those are your people!

Rest assured that even if you get a rejection letter, it is not a reflection of you or what you bring to this world. All that rejection letter says, in all its expected verbosity, is “Hey, I recognize that you are valuable and real and multi-dimensional and awesome, but you aren’t the right fit for our school right now.” Sure, it will suck to get any rejection letters, but you can expect to receive them, and you need to remember that they are not a rejection of who you are and what you stand for; that rejection letter is only a rejection of the quality/qualities that are represented on your application. And you are so much more than that.

And they aren’t to blame, either.

You are wonderfully complex, and you have more than one or two important character traits. How could you possibly show them everything they could ever need to know in 650 words? And how could they possibly hope to understand all the events, all the values, all the people who have made you who you are in that same amount of time? It isn’t possible. You have been given an impossible task. But fret not; everyone else is thinking the same thing. And you are a frickin’ gladiator of words. You are going to write an essay that sparkles and sizzles and slays, and even if you don’t, you are fighting a hard battle and the act of writing something that shines as bright as you is likely the hardest thing you will ever do.

You can do it, though. I believe in you.

You know how to capture their attention. You will dazzle them. And if they aren’t dazzled, then that’s hardly a reflection of you!

Remember this, little applicant: you are the type of student they all want. A student who opens up Common App on Monday morning and thinks, “Bring it on, world. I got this.”