Ardrey Kell's Lauren Eisdorfer has a private college counselor who makes a living helping students get organized during application season. "She's helped me a lot," she says. "It's hard to know where to start."

In addition to countless Web sites, your high school may have school-approved software that can help. For the last five years, Providence High School in Charlotte has offered a $1,000-plus program called Naviance Succeed. Students put in their grade-point average, class rank, interests and more to get a list of potential match schools.

Lauren Eisdorfer's senior year of high school dawned with promise. Promise of a college-prep frenzy, that is. With seven admission applications to fill out — not including financial aid and scholarship forms — and a slew of high school assignments and extracurricular activities, Eisdorfer can barely catch her breath.

"I started my applications over the summer ... but I never feel like I have enough time," says the 18-year-old. "I don't have time to hang out with my friends, and that's what senior year should be about."

This year's first round of college application deadlines already hit, so it's crunch time. Many seniors have experienced the application whirlwind and the agony of the wait.

Here's what some college-admissions veterans had to say:

Limit your applications

Sagan Smith, 22, remembers spending her senior year at Providence High School in Charlotte toiling through college apps — eight, to be exact.

"It was a tense time because you're loaded down with all these extracurriculars to be a cut above the rest to get into college, and a lot of them you really like," says Smith, now a senior psychology major at N.C. State. "But you could practically get an ulcer trying to do everything all at once."

Because one application fee can run $50 to $75, Smith says she could have saved time and money by applying only to schools she could actually see herself attending.

"I applied to a few schools I had absolutely no interest in; they were just to make sure I got into a school," she says. "Seniors, don't kill yourself doing an application for a school you don't want to go to." Now Smith is considering graduate school in clinical social work or family counseling. This go-round she'll be a little more purposeful and a lot less stressed: "I'm certainly not applying to as many schools, probably just three or four that would be a good fit for me."

Visualize life there

Liz Christenbury, 20, first visited Duke University when she was in eighth grade. She visited it again as a sophomore at Charlotte Country Day, when she and her parents helped her older brother, Joe, move into the dorms. And after she submitted her early decision application, she visited again.

"That time I went and stayed with one of
my brother's friends, and she told me stuff
that wasn't in the school handbooks," Christenbury says. "It helped me visualize my life
at that school."

She also visited Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Davidson, Princeton and Stanford. But when it came time to apply, she filled out only one: Duke's. Christenbury got her acceptance letter in mid-December, and her mind was made up.

Most high schools allow juniors and seniors to take several "college days," which are considered school-sanctioned absences. The number of those days varies school to school.

Katie Landers, 20, knew exactly what she wanted as she entered application season: a smaller school with a liberal arts focus. So she applied to seven colleges that met her criteria.

But to pare the list to seven, Landers, then
a senior at Charlotte Country Day, and her
parents visited 20 college campuses. Landers says in retrospect they overdid the visits.
But she says the real stress hit when acceptance — and wait list — letters started
trickling in.

This was the most frustrating part, Landers says. "It was hard to know what exactly to do with a wait list response. Should I just give up on the school? And there was a bit of feeling, 'Well, if they don't want me, then maybe I don't want them either."'

Landers says the most encouraging part was knowing that many of her friends were going through the same thing. "(My parents) were great at helping me talk through my feelings about each school and telling me that my feelings of frustration with the wait lists were normal."

After making a few secondary visits, in mid-April she chose Davidson College — initially her second choice.

"Looking back, I know that I couldn't have made a better decision," says Landers, now a junior English major. Another bit of advice: "Try to relax. ... Things will work out how they're supposed to. I know things did for me, and they did for all my friends."