photo: Lee Cohen/ BY

Lately, I find myself waking up at 5 in the morning and hitting the sack at around midnight. With the constant stress of tests like the SAT, early morning AP classes, and the ultimate fear, college applications, my senior year is not turning out they way I would expected it would. 

There's been plenty of talk about college and financial aid. But what people haven't been mentioning are the reverberating effects of the economic climate. I go to a charter school in Los Angeles and was hoping that my in-state applications would be my "safety schools." But that's turning out to be a pipe dream. With the budget cuts, the University of California and California State University systems have less money to go around and are raising their minimum GPA requirements and lowering their acceptance rates. Since they can service only a smaller number of California residents, the competition among high school seniors will get more intense.

And I thought this year was going to be fun.

More after the jump...

I remember in middle school hearing my cousins tell stories about their last year in high school, which was dotted with spectacular-sounding events like prom and senior dinners. But what you never hear about is the stress and the pressure at the beginning of senior year. Now that I am actually in my senior year, I want to press the fast forward button. It seems that the school day lasts forever. I remember when I was younger, I used to daydream about kicking it at the movies or playing soccer with friends,  but now I've succumbed to daydreaming about sleeping.

My teachers would always remind me how every year of high school would prepare me for my senior year. At first I didn't get it, but now I understand. In fact, my entire senior class has bonded over the stress of graduating and applying to college. Only we, and not the students in the lower grades, can understand what we're going through.

Even though this is probably one of the worst high school experiences I’ll ever have to go through I’m not entirely disappointed with the situation. The rest of my senior class has made it one of the most enjoyable, “sucky” times of my life. And even though I’m stressing about college applications, tests, and meetings, I know that my twenty-five best friends next to me are stressing just as much as I am, which, of course, isn’t exactly good.

But it is good to know that when you need a shoulder to sleep on at lunch, you have twenty-five comfortable pillows that are there for you.