Every year, almost two million teenagers embark to college. For many, this marks the first time they are without their family and fully independent. Some might find it to be a scary time as they have to find new cliques and passions. After a few months trying to adapt, freshman can now reflect on the hectic environment college is in. While some aspects of college are like what Seattle Prep offers, others are alien and are hard to navigate. From navigating around the admissions process to taking part in a larger student body, not all things can be planned.
For Jace Baptista-Allan ‘24, he’s taken it in stride. A freshman at the University of Washington, he’s found that Prep helped him in a ton of ways to adapt into the college lifestyle. When he was applying to colleges however, it was much more challenging. Baptista-Allan said “It’s really going to scale based on how many schools you want to apply to, but for one thing, the essays are probably the most like time consuming part of it. I spent three months getting all those done and another month just for my personal statement.”
As colleges have gotten more and more applications each year, it’s created more competition than ever before. Acceptance rates have been on the decline for the last decade, so more time is being spent on the application process. For Baptista-Allan, Prep was helpful, he added, “it was made a lot easier with the help of counselors because they would send in teacher recommendations for you. They would help manage those and keep you on track. So, it was difficult and time-consuming but not impossible.”
The counselors are a big part of that step, but writing and researching also takes a large chunk of the time. College counseling, led by Ms. Foy and Ms. Covert, have large role in passing the seniors off to their respective colleges. “I guess one thing that was huge was the counselors,” Baptista-Allan said. “My counselor was Ms. Goodwin, she’s no longer at the school. But that was a great system for helping students with applications. They made sure we were on track with submitting everything.”
Not only can they help with logistics, but also being there for questions. “The counselors in general were just super helpful. If I had a question about college, I could go to them” Baptista-Allan said.
Baptista-Allan, a computer science major, also found UW to be a perfect fit for his needs: “UW was for me appealing because obviously it’s local, I get to be with my family, but also it has a good program for almost everything, especially for computer science, which is my major. And it’s also a pretty big school, so there’s a lot of resources for students. The campus is huge, it’s great.”
It’s also fairly similar to Prep. Other than it having 70x the number of students, it is close in proximity and community. “I think Collegio is really good actually, that’s a that’s a pretty good preparation for lecture type classes. There’s a strong sense of community here. There’s a lot of friendly people. There’s also, course wise, kind of similar to my senior year where we can pick out classes. It’s very similar because it has a lot of freedom.”
