Through the months of August to January, high school seniors across the nation and many Casa Grande Gauchos have been applying to local and far away universities. 

A majority of students plan their futures during their final year in high school, and during this time, the season for writing college essays and applications has come upon the graduating class of 2023.

The UC and CSU applications for first-year students were recently due on Nov. 30. These California universities are popular school options for in-state students, including Casa Grande seniors. 

While the CSU application process includes manually putting in grades and sorting through A-G coursework, the application for schools like UCLA, UCSB, and the seven other UC colleges also require four written statements called PIQ essays (Personal Insight Questions) for students to submit. During these past two weeks, Gauchos were either smoothly or frantically completing their applications for these public California colleges. 

One large reason behind the frequent frenzy which arises with applying to UC’s and CSU’s is because of a dreaded conspiracy. 

There is an idea that, as the clock comes closer to the midnight deadline on Nov. 30, the UC and CSU application pages shut down due to high traffic. This would hypothetically cause many students, who wish to turn in their applications close to the deadline, to lose the opportunity of applying to the colleges.

However, this conspiracy has been debunked a few times over the past couple of years. 

Two years ago in 2020, the UC application system crashed due to an “outage” around the day of the deadline. Luckily, the University of California admissions office extended the last submission date from Nov. 30 to Dec. 4, which calmed the senior freakout across the state, as well as others.

Even during this submission season of 2022, several California State schools have extended their deadlines this year into December, past the regular Nov. 30 deadline. It is important to check with a counselor to confirm which CSUs have this option available.

Besides the UC and CSU apps, some students also picked universities they are very optimistic about and applied through early action and early decision to those schools. Those specific seniors sent their applications towards the beginning of November.

Now, those seniors are excitedly waiting for their early decisions which should be arriving during the middle of this month. Dec. 15 is the latest students should be receiving answers.

On top of this, seniors are finalizing their applications to other schools by applying for regular decisions. Many of those deadlines for universities last throughout January.

Lastly, an option for higher education that Casa Grande helps students discover is by applying to the local JC, the Santa Rosa Junior College. Casa offers the SRJC Jumpstart Program, created specifically for senior students who wish to attend the JC and begin their college education inexpensively.