The college admissions process — endless research, applications, essays, letters, emails, questions, scholarships and waiting. Lots of waiting.

After spending hours, days or even weeks writing essays and filling out personal information in the form of drop-down menus and financial figures, you can end up feeling disoriented regarding your own identity.

Although everyone is aware the application only ever displays the perfect version of yourself, it can still be difficult to separate yourself from that image at the end of the day because you spent the last years in high school curating everything in your life just to impress the admissions office of a certain school.

Every choice you make culminates in the single event of pressing the submit button on a college application.

And sometimes, all that arduous effort put into creating the ideal model of yourself ends up for nothing as the decisions begin rolling in and the letter declares “wait-listed” or “rejected.”

Students can begin feeling down on themselves, concluding that they weren’t smart enough or hard-working enough or skilled enough or just plain good enough for the schools they were applying to.

However, students should be sure to not let the admissions process determine who they are or poison their passion for knowledge.

Not only do colleges use an impersonal system to judge applicants, including “personality scores,” the admissions officers who review the applications are often graduate students who are underpaid and just a few years older than seniors graduating from Blue Valley, according to The Atlantic.

And even if you’re trying your hardest in your classes, you may still be deemed unfit for the college — some critics compare the system to a lottery. If you’re applying to schools with a low acceptance rate, you may not get in even if your resume seems sharp and your grades high.

Additionally, many people are beginning to recognize that the admissions process is failing students and are starting initiatives to change it.

Therefore, students need to acknowledge that they hold much more value than what a college declares.

And remember that in a decade or two, what you will cherish is not necessarily the name of the school you went to but the experience of attending it. The friends you make, the information you absorb and the passions you undertake are what you will look back on.

Of course, it’s much easier to say, “Don’t let college decisions determine how you feel about yourself” than do, but when you receive your decisions, just step back, take a few breaths and relax.