Underclassmen and juniors may envy the seniors, assuming that our senior year is the easiest of them all. However, that belief is far from true. 

The biggest impediment every senior faces is balancing time to complete college applications with academics and social life.

To put it simply, it is basically junior year plus college applications. 

However, two feelings that only we — the senior class — can understand is the heavenly satisfaction of submitting our college applications and the anxiety-stricken period of anticipation as we wait for our admission status. 

Students who decided to act early on some colleges will surely get their admissions much sooner than those who applied as regular admits.

Therefore, students who applied for regular admission are left waiting for four to six months for colleges to give us that nerve-racking, “There has been a status update in your portal,” email. 

During this stressful time, we must keep ourselves busy to prevent adding excessive mental stress. 

After submitting my college applications, I thought I would have no more goals left to achieve. As a result, I have had many sleepless nights when I pondered over what I would do if I didn’t get accepted to my dream college. 

Therefore, the key to surviving these stressful times is to keep yourself busy and have other goals to strive for. 

One of my biggest goals was to live a healthier lifestyle by going to the gym. By spending about one to two hours a day exercising, I distracted myself from the gut-wrenching anxiety that resided in me when I would think about my upcoming college decisions.

However, the COVID-19 outbreak has unfortunately put a quick stop to my daily sessions at the gym. Because my parents restricted me from going out of the house completely, eating and hanging out with friends were also out of the picture. 

As a result, I resorted to playing video games, such as “Call of Duty: Mobile” and “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.” But, what I learned after playing over 50 hours of “Call of Duty: Mobile” in a week was that I had to pace myself. 

If I stuck to just playing video games on a daily basis, I would eventually become bored, and my eyes would have suffered as well. 

So, I had a variety of activities that I wanted to do every day, ranging from baking to binge-watching my favorite animes and TV shows.

I ended up not only getting closer with my younger sister through baking cookies and brownies, but I also enjoyed watching many shows, such as “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”, “Hunter x Hunter” and “The Promised Neverland.” 

In addition to waiting for college decisions, the coronavirus outbreak has stripped us seniors of many events, such as prom, the “Paper Toss” on our last day of school and graduation, making it even more difficult to stay positive during this time. 

After binge-watching the “High School Musical” series amid this global epidemic, I have a message to our Class of 2020: We’re all in this together.