1. You’re going to get into college and be happy wherever you go.

Wherever you go, chances are you’re going to love it and your experience will be determined by what you do when you get there. And if you don’t enjoy your college, you can always transfer to a different school!

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you have to get into your dream school or your dreams will come crashing down. Dream schools are a marketing gimmick that help out admissions officers and it’s as silly as the notion of only having one true love.

I got rejected from my top choice (Stanford), whose posters I’d had plastered on my bedroom walls since 9th grade. Again, no one is crying here, I went to Yale. If you asked me at any point in high school what I would do if I didn’t get into Stanford, I would have said that it wasn’t possible, I had to get in.

2. Where you go to college doesn’t determine your success in life.

It’s true: having a Ivy League degree gives me a stamp of approval. I’m prescreened to be hard-working, curious, passionate and willing to do mostly anything to succeed. Everyone wants to hire for that.

But take a look at Silicon Valley — you can be all those things without going to one of the top 10 schools listed in US News and World Report. Some people don’t even go to college! Those great qualities I just mentioned are the reasons you’ll succeed in life (they just happen to help you get into top schools, too).

Studies do show that where you go to college affects your paycheck and if you want to get into investment banking, do academic research or go to a top tier law school, it helps and sometimes is required that you go to certain schools. If so, do your research but also know that you’ll probably change your career choice in college, anyway. And from personal experience, I think the career field you choose, willingness/ability to negotiate, and (let’s face it) gender will have a greater effect on your paycheck.

3. Parents: Where your kid goes to college will not determine their success in life.

4. Sleep more.

I averaged 4-6 hours of sleep on a school night during high school. Sometimes I wouldn’t get home from practice, volunteering, SAT class, etc., until 9pm, at which point I’d start my homework. I fell asleep with my schoolbooks enough times that I had acetone on hand to get pen marks off of my face.

Does this remind you of you? If so, get some sleep tonight and keep up the habit.

I have a bad memory: I don’t remember a lot of what happened in high school. This could be aging-related, but I wonder if my lack of sleep had something to do with it.

5. Spend time with your family.

When is the last time you ate dinner with your family? How long has it been since you called your grandparents? Do you know what boy (or girl) your sister has a crush on?

To help pay for the extracurriculars that beefed up my and my sisters’ resumes, we didn’t take family vacations for a few years. I rarely saw my sisters except when we’d yell at each other to get out of the bathroom or ride in the car to school. In those years, I mostly remember my mom as a willing, patient chauffeur.

I wish I’d spent more time getting to know my mom, dad and sisters. My whole family watched a movie together a few years ago, UP, and I cried because it was the first time that we’d watched a movie or done anything together in years.One of us was always too busy with homework or at practice. Now that we’re working and spread out across the country, we’re even busier.

It’s busy now but after you hand in your applications, hang out with your family more.

6. Don’t apply to too many schools.

I applied to 13 schools. That’s partly why I’m good at college essays. I was in the middle of my 14th application when I got burned out and stopped midway through their supplemental essays. I just couldn’t write anymore.

If you can help it, do yourself a favor and cut the list down.

Again, this is a hard thing to say to people applying to top-tier colleges since the application process is such a crapshoot you almost have to apply to all of them out of fear that you won’t get in to any.

7. Don’t do drugs even though everyone else is.

I didn’t do drugs but I know kids who did and still do. People abuse Ritalin. Caffeine is everywhere (I’m considering it a drug here because that’s how it’s used). When I had to pull an all-nighter I’d eat a small spoon-full of coffee grinds after my parents had gone to sleep, since they didn’t let me drink coffee. Chugging Red Bulls, Diet Cokes and massive amounts of coffee to stay up because you aren’t sleeping isn’t healthy.

If you’re doing it now, when you get to college you’ll keep it up and add alcohol to the mix to take you down from the agitated caffeine highs, drown out the stress and reduce the social awkwardness of being in your late teens and early twenties.

Do yourself a favor and start treating your body right now so that you’ll say no when you’re tempted to treat it badly later. Also, revel in the awkwardness, it’s how you’ll learn to deal with it.

8. Find (healthy) outlets to reduce your stress.

I went four months without getting my period my junior year of high school because of stress. I had to go to the doctor to take a pill so that my period would come back.

You’re probably really stressed out! Find ways to cope and reduce the stress: exercise, meditate, sing or play an a song that isn’t on the band music list. Spend a full Saturday doing nothing related to school. Give yourself a break.

9. Take care of your health

This is part II of #8. Nothing is more important than your health. Stress is bad for your health.

Kind of funny story: I had my appendix taken out my senior year of high school. The first time it flared up, I went to the hospital. It had stopped hurting by the time we got there so doctors told me that I was having a stress attack because I’d visited Princeton the day before. I believed them because I was stressed, but I also remember telling them, “But, I don’t think I’m that stressed. I mean, I hated Princeton. I might not even apply!” I went home.

When the same pain came back a few months later, I almost didn’t go to the hospital because I was too embarrassed to be having a stress attack. I also had math homework to do. Lucky for me, my friend ratted my out to my mom because I looked like the walking dead. They chopped that thing right out!

Stay healthy!

10. Learn because you’re a nerd and you love doing it. When you love what you learn, you’ll do better!

High school sucks for overachievers because everyday you work hard for the purpose of getting into the best college. Every action you take is based on getting a score, not building mastery. But what you really want to do is gain mastery.

I spent so many hours in high school memorizing vocabulary words that I can no longer remember and learning how to interpret the tricky wording of SAT math problems instead of learning math.

Another story: I had a 690 in Verbal when I took the SATs at the end of junior year. I was freaked out about not getting into an Ivy League school with that score but I was also bored of studying flashcards, so I spent the summer reading books I wanted to read like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and every book that Dave Barry wrote. I hadn’t read that much in months!

I took the test again in October and got an 800.

If you do something because you love it, you’ll do it a lot, and then you’ll automatically get better at it. You have to do some of the boring/stupid learning to succeed at standardized tests (even after high school), but it’s the real learning that will help you later on life and could probably help you now, too.

11. Bonus Tip: You can still get into college if your essay has grammar mistakes. You might make less grammar mistakes if you sleep.