His acceptance letters came early, so Kunal Tanna is one of the lucky ones.
Both the University of Georgia, his first choice, and Georgia State University sent congratulatory letters back in December and March.
But for months before the news came to the Mountain View High School senior, Tanna had worn a path to his guidance counselor’s office.
“Kunal would come down every day to give me a status update,” said Melissa Nelson, a counselor at the Lawrenceville school. “It was very exciting when he found out he got in.”
For thousands of metro Atlanta high school seniors, that day still can’t come soon enough.
Although many of the nation’s colleges notify applicants that they are accepted or rejected by April 1, many seniors either are still trying to decide where to enroll or stuck in limbo because they have been waitlisted.
Meanwhile, families, friends and school counselors are doing their best to deal with the highs and lows of the annual ritual.
"The ups and downs are like being on a roller coaster, and when you're 18, it can be like the end of the world," Nelson said.
Even seniors who celebrated an admissions offer weeks or months ago say these days are heavy with stress over financial aid.
“Our seniors especially have a lot going on, so they’ve been worrying all year about this on top of AP classes, extracurriculars and jobs,” said Renee Ferrerio, head counselor at Northview High School in Johns Creek. “Even if they were admitted during early action, it’s probably not cut and dried for a lot of them.”
Ferrerio said counselors there emphasize to students during their junior year to apply to "safety" schools so that they will have a backup plan if they are not accepted at the university of their choice.
In many instances, because Northview has so many high achievers, Ferrerio said a safety school could actually be UGA.
It’s not unusual, she said, for Northview seniors to apply to up to 10 colleges.
At the end of the school day Friday, Ferrerio said Northview seniors gathered in the hallway to check for emails from UGA.
“Did you get in?” was the popular refrain among them, she said. “They were all sharing with each other. We had a couple of situations where kids were very angry, but for the most part, I saw a lot of excitement in the hallway.”
Mostly, Ferrerio said, Northview students are now making their final decisions.
Katherine Chen’s choices, for instance, came down to the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.
The schools were among seven to which Chen applied. Only Stanford rejected her, she said. The rest she rejected for Berkeley.
Because this is the last week to make a decision, Ferrerio said that students who are on the waiting list to their top choice are having the toughest time.
“They have to put down a deposit by May 1, but in many cases won’t know if they’ve been admitted to those schools until June or July," Ferrerio said. “I think it’s harder for those kids.”
It was for Chen, who until last week was put on top choice Berkeley's waitlist.
Although disappointed, Chen, 17, said she pictured herself at UCLA and got over it. When she finally heard back from Berkeley, she said, “It was exciting, but the more I thought about it, the more unhappy I became because I had to choose between the two.”
Tanna, 17, always knew he wanted to go to UGA. What scared him, he said, was reading that 19,000 other students wanted to go, too. They were competing for 5,100 slots.
"The first thing that came to my mind was there had to be better applicants than me," he said.
He knew he had to set himself apart, and he did it with his essay, writing about how he dealt with his mother's recent death and earned a spot on Mountain View's varsity wrestling team even though he has cerebral palsy.
Nelson, Tanna's counselor at Mountain View, said some seniors have come to her office in tears because they didn't get into their first choice school.
"We tell them it's OK to be upset. We then get them to focus on where do they go from here," Nelson said. "It is important to keep them moving in a positive direction."
Nelson said that seniors this year seem more stressed than ever before because they realize the competition is tougher and the economic status of a lot of families is worse or much more unstable.
"Even if they get into the school they wanted, they're still stressing about finances because the HOPE scholarship now pays only 90 percent of tuition and there is no book allowance," she said.
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