As college commitment day, May 1, approaches, our seniors find their future homes daily. With the help of a non-KHS affiliated instagram page @khs.seniors.2024 run by senior Sophia Martin, students can DM (direct message) the account about their college updates and share them with the students of KHS.
Martin is the admin of the senior decision page. “I created the instagram page myself with the help of some friends to get it running quicker,” said Martin.
While being an admin for an instagram page can be timely, Martin never manages to disappoint her classmates and all the other students, families, and friends who enjoy keeping up with the school’s graduating class. Even though this is a public account, Martin decided to keep it separate from the other KHS-affiliated accounts. “Because I run this account myself, it is not affiliated with Kinnelon High School, as I stated in the bio.”
This is not the first year students have created a decision page for the seniors; Martin wanted to fulfill the senior’s expectations as well as her own. “To create the decision posts, I use this app called Canva and they specifically have an Instagram square template to make the design process a whole lot easier. I know some previous decision posts and accounts also used Canva for this process,” stated Martin.
As May 1 approaches closer and closer to the final decision day, more and more students are starting to commit to college. No student is required to submit their college information to the account, but students who want to display their success can with the help of Martin.
“For this first decision post I created, it took about 20 minutes because I had to create the entire layout of the post and choose the proper fonts. Now, it takes me about five minutes because I can easily copy and paste the original template and fill in the college name, logo, major, minor, sport (if wanted), and senior photo into the template. I also had the KHS yearbook teacher, Ms, Andrascik, send me a Google Drive of everyone’s senior photo.” said Martin.
Martin has for sure made this experience for the seniors very easy, and each post is unique for the student. Not only does Martin have to post-college decisions but she can also post for students attending a trade school, cosmetology school, and more for the student’s futures.
“Since the account is run by myself, the process is pretty easy also because everyone sends me their decisions pretty spread out. I only get a couple of DM’s every few weeks, especially since a lot of people have not heard back from some schools yet. I anticipate a lot of commitment posts in the last two weeks of March and towards the beginning of April as well.”
Since Dec. 6, 2023, when the first commitment post was created, Martin has been able to keep active as well as fulfill a little aspect of the senior’s commitments. “I wanted to run the account because I enjoy making the posts, and also because I was not sure if anyone else was going to make an account so I decided to take the initiative and create the account. I’m also the class president so I felt like it made the most sense if I ran it,” said Martin.
Overall, Martin has been very resourceful and responsible throughout the whole college commitment process and she has also been very successful with the account she runs.
