You get waitlisted and it’s the same thing all over again.”

Bella Kashefi, like many seniors, spent hours and hours poring over her college applications, working hard to perfect them. But once she started receiving her long-awaited responses in mid-March, she was not happy with her results — a combination of schools on her safety list, schools she couldn’t afford, and a place on the waitlist.

That’s when Kashefi started the multi-month process of trying to get off the waitlist.

“I thought that if I worked really hard then it would pay off,” Kashefi said, “but that’s not what happened.”

Kashefi felt like she was reliving the stress and pressure that came with originally applying to colleges.

“Once you’re on the waitlist, [the colleges] don’t even tell you what to do,” Kashefi said. “They leave it very ambiguous and very open ended.”

Kashefi said she tried everything — carefully crafting an appeal, researching how other students got off their waitlists, and actually road tripping down to UC Santa Barbara to convince admissions officers to take her off the waitlist.

“The annoying thing about the waitlist is that you start thinking you have a chance,” Kashefi said. “Since you are on the waitlist, you start thinking that they saw something in me, they like me.”

According to the self-reported results from the Senior Survey, 116 seniors were waitlisted at at least one college.

The most difficult part about being on the waitlist, according to Kashefi, is that those students are still unsure of their college plans while the rest of the class has it figured out.

“Second semester everyone knows where they are going and the waitlist is still going on until the day you graduate,” Kashefi said.

While other seniors had the chance to “check out” during the second semester, Kashefi had to work hard to keep her grades up to impress colleges. She said she struggled with what else to share with colleges in her appeal.

“They say, ‘put new and compelling information,’ but all I did first semester was college apps,” she said.

Although Kashefi’s mom kept telling her there was no way she’d get off the waitlist, she couldn’t help but have hope for herself.

“No matter how many times she said that, I would block her out and not care what she was saying. I was thinking, ‘Mom I’m on the waitlist, they like me,’” Kashefi said.

Kashefi also noted the “mind-games” that come with being on the waitlist.

“You are thinking ‘What if I go here? What if I don’t go here?’ and you’re totally not going to go there,” Kashefi said.

But she had to keep herself motivated.

“You can’t just sit there and wait until you get off the waitlist until you get into a school,” Kashefi said. “They want people that want to go there.”

Although Kashefi is still unsure of her final plans for next year, she tries not to regret the little things along the way in her college process.

“If I didn’t give it my all and hadn’t stressed this whole time, I wouldn’t have been happy either way,” Kashefi said.

Kashefi has been accepted to University of Southern California for her second year. She is planning on attending UC Davis and hoping to transfer to USC for her second year of college if she can keep a 3.6 GPA – unless she gets positive news back from her current dream school, UCSB.