For seniors, the first semester of the year is usually spent straining over college applications. Some students are required to do extensive work for the institutions they’re applying for, whether that’s essays or short answer questions.

“Writing a bunch of essays and personal statements was like so time-consuming and I had to have the motivation,” senior Jasmy Mavilla said. “That on top of school and work and everything was a lot,”.

While not every senior has a particularly rigorous schedule, for Mavilla applications have taken a lot of energy to complete. Additionally, some seniors like Mavilla choose to apply to up to 20 different institutions. However, for Mavilla the benefits of applying to a higher number of institutions don’t outweigh the cost.

“The only real thing you can get out of applying to more colleges is just more chances of getting in,” Mavilla said.

When students decide where to apply, one of the factors that go in is whether a school is an Ivy League or a school with low acceptance rates. While some might question why people would apply to schools with less than 10% admission rates, there are multiple advantages for some students.

“People are looking for jobs and they see on their resume they graduated from whatever Ivy League school that reputation you’re always getting a job that they want,” counselor Marc Conover said.

While Ivy League college’s low admission rates give them considerable reputations for seniors to consider, they can make the anticipation of decisions particularly stressful.

“That particular school has probably got a million applications and they can only accept so many,” Conover said.

The pressures of applying to these elite universities can come from the institutions as well as the applicants themselves. Senior Julia Kwan felt that the stressors for the process came from both.

“The higher expectations, the schools’ and my own, caused the application process to involve more time and stress,” Kwan said.