College is supposed to be something  juniors and seniors freak out about. They spend their last two years of high school worrying about grades, SAT and ACT scores, applications and college tours. Graduating isn’t even an ultimate goal—it’s going to that dream school they’ve had in mind since they were little.

But, getting into college is also something freshmen freak out over. Yes, there are that few who don’t even begin to think about anything beyond graduating, let alone college.  But, there are freshmen who started freaking out about college the day they walked into the Upper School. They walk among you all today. They are the ones who were disappointed with an A on their first semester report card because they knew Stanford wouldn’t take anything less than an A+. They are the freshmen who were thoroughly disappointed with their PSAT scores because they knew Yale wouldn’t even show the slightest interest. These are the freshmen who’ve started googling “How to Start a Foundation” because they know that’s something Brown would love. These are the freshmen who’ve begun to stalk their dream school—online or in real life, we don’t know for sure.

These freshmen believe that they need straight A+’s, perfect SAT scores, boatloads of community service hours, and more extracurricular activities than you can count on both hands. There’s obviously competition when trying to get into one’s dream school, and these freshmen create the competition early. Whether it’s getting an A on that vocab test  when the other guy who wanted to go to Columbia got an A+, or competing to see whose Harvard sweatshirt came in first, competition is there.

From everyone’s perspective, freshmen have nothing to worry about. To everyone else, graduation is three years away. But still, students can’t just slack off freshmen year and totally neglect everything.  Many feel the need to focus on the now and make sure they are the best now because to many freshmen, college is everything. They believe that colleges start looking at grades freshmen year. It’s been said that they don’t, but who knows, by the time we freshman graduate, colleges just might be looking at what we did in middle school. Pine Crest ingrains it in our minds to think out about (freak out about) college. College is the ultimate goal, they tell us.

We freak out about college because we freak out about the future. We’re totally unsheltered there, and we’re all on our own. Decisions we make every day impact us so much, but there’s something about college that makes that impact larger. The looming idea of college makes everything more worrisome. The thought of not getting an acceptance letter from our dream school scares us. It’s something we all prefer not to think about. We CAN do it. We WILL get in. Why? Because we do everything we can. But is it okay for freshmen to start worrying now?

The future is scary. We don’t know what it holds. But as freshmen, I think it’s safe to say that we all need to calm down. It’s alright to be ambitious and have dreams, but if you’re obsessing, I think you’re just psyching yourself out. We’re stressing ourselves out for something that’s three years away. It’s good to have an idea of where you want to go or what you want to do with your life, but it’s also okay if you have absolutely no idea what you want to do with your life. Focus on doing well now, and continuing to do well. If you can do this right, you’ll have no problem achieving your goals.

I admit, I was one of those crazy freshmen. The future was constantly on my mind until October. I had a chance to think over what I wanted to do when I graduated from college and totally re-evaluated where I wanted to attend, permitting I got accepted. I switched from a large Ivy League school in a big city and small, poorly-paying job, to another large school in my hometown and a better-paying job.  I still have my idealistic world: getting into my dream school and having my dream job, but I learned to focus more and take things in stride.  But, college will still be on my mind until I have that acceptance letter in my hand.