College acceptance season may be winding down for some, while others still must linger and wait until future dates in March and April, which seem like ages away for high school seniors. Seniors, you guys have been through a lot, the journey to college has been a long fought battle. It was through the extracurriculars that you sometimes had no desire to sign up for, and long hours studying that led you up to the big payoff: the big envelope. The phrases of "I'm just doing this so it looks good on my application," and "if I don't do (fill in the blank) I'm not gonna get into college!" no longer apply to you. The applications have been sent, the letters of recommendation have been written, and the waiting has finally subsided.

You have all your letters set out on the table, your work over the past years is laid out before you, and you begin to absorb the fact that you'll be a student at one of these places, as you try to recollect walking on their respective campuses, and trying to imagine yourself on those campuses in a couple months. You got some options, you got some good options.

You walk into school the next day ready to share your list that you've been working so hard on--for an eternity it seems like--with your friends. Sharing your list of schools with your friends feels good; you worked hard on that list and take a lot pride in it. As the conversation shifts focus onto your friends, they start to rattle off all their options. They start listing schools like Yale, Cornell, Boston College, Penn, Vanderbilt, Berkeley, and so on, and you can't help but look down on your list. Penn? Yale? BC? Those schools were next to impossible for you to get into, and your friends just list them like they got in with ease.

Tip: If your friends dare to boast about how much money they got to go to said school without you asking, they should be done away with accordingly. No one needs to hear about. Good for them that they got the money, but they don't need to tell the whole world about it.

Your college list is your list. You liked the schools on the paper, and you liked some of them even more when you visited them. Own your list, odds are that you're gonna be very happy at the school you pick in the end anyway, because remember you picked your list! You picked the schools that you wanted to spend the next four years at, and you should base your decision off of the place where you think you'll be the happiest, not because it's on some Top 10 list for the best engineering program. College is what you make it, it's not what's on some college ranking website, and it's certainly not about comparing your school to your friends. College will be fun, and when you walk onto campus and make new friends, comparing college lists will be a thing of the past.