Being an undergraduate is hard!

In order to pay for college, one must spend numerous hours in applications, submitting yourself to endless questions about every personal detail in your life since you were born. Seriously, if you can't remember your first grade teacher's brother's granddaughter's dog's name, you're not getting any help paying for college. If that's not bad enough, you have to submit a different set of data for every single application. Your college application wants to know what your great uncle twice removed gave you for your 4th birthday, while the scholarship application finds it crucial to know where your parents buried your first pet that you didn't know died until you filled out the application!!! Each of these applications also takes a tremendous amount of time to complete. In today's modern era, one would think the application process would be simplfied and convenient, but the truth is actually quite different than expected:

FAFSA (the thing you have to do to get government grants) - 4 hrs. This is, of course, assuming you understand all of the directions the first time, despite the vagueness of every single question, and that your parents are sitting right behind you with their tax information in hand, every important bit of information highlighted, color-coded, put in chronological order, and translated into farsi so that there is no doubt that your parents are indeed your parents, and you are indeed frustrated.

College application - 4 hrs. Provided you write all your essays in advance, in binary, this application goes relatively quickly. You only have to provide your entire life's employment, academic, genetic, and volunteer activities while explaining why you love this school so much though you've never even seen the campus or even know what the mascot is.

Scholarship application - 4hrs. Again, more essays. These essays are different than the ones you wrote before, I hope you're good at editing, because writing new essays every time gets old FAST. Other than that, there's not too much of an issue. Keep your day job though, you won't know if you got a scholarship until months later, and if you don't make any money in the mean time, you won't have a backup. Things ALWAYS go wrong when you don't have a backup.

I know what you're thinking, 12 hrs isn't so bad, especially when you consider the education received. Let me just counter by saying that these applications need to be done Every Single Year. Still not bad, you say? 12hrs is the bare minimum of time you have to spend on these. I've been working on them since Christmas, and I'm still not done! The entire process seems to be designed to cause the most amount of frustation possible. College expects you to be able to finish all these applications, while taking classes, while holding down a job, while finishing your homework, while participating in society, while having a social life, while being available to participate is unplanned events, while sleeping an adequate amount of time.

College is great, but it's a LOT of work.

This has been fun, but I have 4 assignments due tomorrow, 2 applications to finish, and 5 textbooks to read. I'll see you sometime next July...