<p>Hi, I’m a Yale student sporadically lurking the fora (mostly to hype Yale every chane I get). I popped in today, and all these new, slightly panicked, app-season threads bittersweetly reminded me of one: all the gazillions of stupid things the application process made ME worry about back in the day, and two, how incredibly helpful and supportive this forum was when nobody else was around to set things straight or calm me down.</p>
<p>So I wanted to make a thread dedicated to telling you guys everything will be just fine. That’s really just it. It’s ok to forget 2 cents of your stamp postage. Your F-1 visa will transfer easy-breezy. It doesn’t matter if your teacher got one letter of the address wrong, if the financial aid documents aren’t coming up as received yet, if you sent in one SAT score too many, if you marked yourself as a Polycelian instead of Cylopelian major and now fret you might just have ruined your entire life because Cylopelians had .000087% higher admit rate last year.</p>
<p>Me, I obsessed over every single paperwork tangle. I fretted over those 2-cent mistakes that in my mind snowballed to immediate rejection from civilized society and a reservation for a gutter somewhere. I F5:ed this forum a lot, and spent most of the time convinced my application would never even make it to a living person.</p>
<p>People do screw up their application sometimes. In fact, they screw up much much more important stuff on a scale larger than anything anyone’s panicked over here, and you know what? Most of the time, it all works out anyway. It really does. Yale isn’t out to get you for a 20 seconds late financial aid document or that tiny smudge over your signature. You worry, you wait, - then you get here, and finally, finally realize that this is a real place with real people that care about you getting here. You’ve done the best you could putting together the application, and now, it’s mercifully out of your hands. </p>
<p>They process more applications every year here than I’ve eaten dorritos in my entire life, and they’re used to common mistakes and glitches (it’s almost as if this was their job or something). If anything is missing, they will contact you; if anything is a little late, they won’t even notice until the backlog has cleared; if some tiny part of your application isn’t perfect, it probably won’t make or break you. No single part of it will. Whatever you are worrying about right now, I can say with 99% certainty that it’ll seem a completely ridiculous detail once the worrywart fog has cleared.</p>
<p>So sit back, scratch your belly and know that application zen is possible. It’s out of your hands. Go with the flow. You’re done and you did the best you could. Repeat mantra as needed. </p>
<p>Good luck to all of you! We’ll be bumping into each other on campus some day and repeating that same mantra for grad school and job applications. </p>
<p>I’m already practicing my breathing technique.</p>