My Biggest Fear

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My Biggest Fear

                At this point in my life, I have one single glaring biggest fear, which dwarfs all others.  I’m in the last term of my junior year in high school, and I am going to be in college before I know it.  I’m not scared of actually going to college, however.  I’m greatly conflicted by the major decision I need to make about what I’m going to study in college, which will determine what I do for the rest of my life.  I also have very little idea which college I want to go to.  I think about these two things every single day, and nothing scares me more than thinking that I may choose the wrong thing and the wrong place.

                In the past, and up to as recently as about two years ago, every college had full-ride, 100% scholarships available, to at least a few students.  My whole life, I have planned on going to college for free, but as of the last couple of years, due to the bad economy and large budget cuts in education, a great deal of these scholarships have gone away.  At all the top colleges that I want to go to, they have now adopted a policy of “need-based only” scholarships.  They are in no way based on merit, but only on what they decide you can pay.  Despite manipulating our family’s money around as well as possible to make us look as poor as possible to these schools, we still are somehow “able” to pay $25,000-30,000 per year.  Therefore, these supposedly top schools are becoming less and less of an option for me.  However, I know some people at my school that have terrible parents who don’t pay any child support, and they get to go anywhere they want  for almost free.

                So, in the end, I don’t know what I want to do, I don’t know where I want to go, I don’t know how much I should be willing to pay, and time is quickly running out.  The amount of stress this puts on me is indescribable.  Again, my biggest fear is choosing the wrong thing to study, and choosing the wrong college to go to.  I fear this more than I fear death; I don’t remember anything ever scaring me more.  The only comparable things were when my mom had cancer when I was three years old, and when my grandparents were on the brink of death before they both died in the last year.  They would be some of the first people I would turn to in my current situation.  However, though they are not here, I am confident they are watching over me, and will guide me no matter what decision I make.