For all of you college-bound seniors who have started on your Common App, have started to ask your teachers and counselors for recommendation letters, and have started to pull your hair out because you’re only confident that you can’t do it – you’re worrying for nothing because college applications don’t mean much of anything.

That’s right. I said it.

Prestigious colleges are never going to have a set formula for admissions. They can’t because they all look at applications “holistically”. That’s the way it is.

So rather than worrying so much about not being good enough, realize that it doesn’t have anything to do with that. Your SAT score is not an indication of how good of a person you are, it doesn’t tell anyone about how funny you are. According to studies, it’s not a magic number that predicts your future, and a score of 2400 doesn’t mean that you’ve cured cancer. And frankly, I wish it did, but it doesn’t.

You hear stories all the time about how perfect 2400s are rejected. So what does that tell you? That all of the use for that scoring is arbitrary? Maybe. Surely, SAT scores and college applications serve some sort of purpose. Absolutely. But the fact that someone got a 2400 and you got a 1920 simply means that someone got a 2400 and you got a 1920. Beyond that, who even cares?

But of course, you won’t believe me because these scores “will determine the rest of your life” and “they’re an indication of who you are and what you have done.” But they won’t, and they’re not. And you probably won’t realize this until much later after this whole process is done.

Don’t get me wrong; college applications are necessary, but they’re not the end of the world. That being said, avoid extra, unnecessary stress by just getting them out of the way early. The only thing you need to worry about are the essays anyway because they’re the only things you truly have control over when you start applying.

Realize that college applications are no more and no less than a way colleges know who’s applying and who they can accept. And, once more, the reason they don’t matter is because that piece of paper is never going to tell you who you are.

So chill out. College will come and it will probably be the best thing ever. You’re going to be someone’s roommate and someone’s best friend. You’re going to have heartbreak. You’re going to have the best days of your life. You’re going to get a great education. So let go because life doesn’t wait for you to give your opinion on what you want. Life simply happens.