Imagine if you’d spent three-and-a-half years of nearly full-time preparation to secure a date to the senior prom with one particular person. It would be almost impossible not to feel enormous gravity on the day you finally make the ask.
All the work and focus and dedication has come to this. Your friends are watching. Your family is watching. It’s finally here. No turning back now. Will it be a yes or no?
Of course, while the intensity of that drama will peak on that day, it will diminish every day after that. If you get a yes, you go to the prom together. If you get a no, you go to the prom with someone else. The drama of that one day is incongruous with the event itself. Getting a yes or no to the prom isn’t the same as getting a yes or no to whether or not you’ll receive a life-saving kidney transplant. But all the build-up sure can make it feel that way.
The day the decision from your dream college arrives is not unlike this.
Yes, your college education has a lot more long-term life consequences than your prom does. But when you’ve spent three years dreaming—and working toward the goal—of attending one school (or a short list of schools), the day that decision arrives will carry enormous gravity, especially given how many people close to you will want to know the answer, too.
But believe it or not, decision day will eventually prove to have been (almost) just another day. Whether your dream school says yes or no, the story that college will eventually hold in your life won’t be about this day at all. It will be about everything that happened next, how you went to that dream school—or how you found an even better fit someplace else–how you made new friends, how you found your calling, how you overcame unforeseen challenges, and how you learned and grew and had fun for four years.
Seniors, parents of seniors, and friends of those seniors, as decisions roll in, please try to remember that decision day is not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of one. And what happens next is where all the good parts are waiting.