After graduation, I always envisioned myself, the English major, living in a cardboard box on the banks of the Charles River. And I always expected my roommates, the future opera singer and Freudian psychologist and my boyfriend, the journalist, to someday occupy similar boxes in our slapped-together riverside, refrigerator box shantytown.

Granted, we would not have food, heat or electricity, but instead of boring, entry-level jobs, we would spend our days philosophizing, collecting aluminum cans and drinking wine from brown paper sacks. We could happily live our own American dream as a slightly bastardized, American equivalent of the Bloomsbury group.

But Henry Longfellow was right when he wrote, ‘all things change.’ My dreams for a future of fun, relaxation and integrity disintegrated faster than a cardboard refrigerator box left out in the rain. Suddenly we traded our carefree, no-plans-at-all future for goal-oriented career paths: the opera singer wants to move halfway around the world to study Asian culture; the psychologist, after spending half a year doing impossible work-for-distinction research and applying to impressive PhD programs, wants to start a full-time MD program in next fall; the journalist changes his mind every other day; and I want to go to law school.

I think, however, we picked the wrong year to do it.

My friends don’t have it easy. The opera singer is facing the daunting task of trying to move 7,000 miles away; the psychologist is in the middle of finishing her Kaplan test prep course, taking the MCATS and applying to several ridiculously competitive medical schools; the journalist is trying to figure out what exactly he wants to study if at all. As for me, the more I warm to the idea of law school, the more impossible and far reaching its realization seems to become.

First, as with the other acronyms (i.e. MD, PhD, MBA and MA), JD programs are facing a deluge of applications this year. Spurned by the tight job market, thousands of college seniors who would ordinarily apply for jobs after college are instead applying to degree programs. Plus with the country’s unsteady economic status, thousands of unemployed or displaced professionals are going back to school hoping to start more successful careers.

For JD programs alone, this year the numbers are staggering. According to the U.S. News and World Report and USA Today, on average, law schools will process 40 percent more applications this year than last year.

Second, while everyone will tell you how ridiculously expensive post-graduate studies are, few people realize just how expensive the application process itself is. Like everything else, the GREs, MCATS, and LSATs are a huge moneymaker and there are tons of hidden costs. For example, when applying to law school, one can plan on spending anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000. From the ‘necessary’ test prep course, which costs well over $1,000, to the LSATs themselves $100 apiece to registering for the Law School Admission’s Council’s national database – another $100 to the additional fees for each report sent to an applicant’s potential law schools, to the cost of the applications themselves, which run anywhere from $30 to $100.

While I’d planned on taking out loans for law school, I never thought I would need a loan for the application process itself. In the midst of the application process, I’ve become an insomniac, plagued by nightmares of application fees and financial aid rejection letters and apparitions of FAFSA forms and student loan applications.

While costs and competition are daunting, a third, more difficult aspect of applying to post-graduate programs is actually deciding where to go and what to do. At 22 years old, it is difficult to commit to something that is supposedly the foundation of a life-long career. Even harder still is choosing just how far you will go to make that commitment. Is it worth leaving your friends? Or your family? Or you significant other to move across country for a chance at a better law, medical or graduate school? For someone like me, who barely ventured 15 miles from home to attend college, the decision is a tough one. Furthermore, after spending four years acclimating to Boston, making new friends and becoming very comfortable with this institution, it is difficult to imagine returning to post-graduate equivalent of first semester freshman year.

As I’m stuck somewhere in the limbo of application process now, I can tell you that applying to postgraduate school is a scary thing. From the MCATs to the LSATS to the GREs, the exams themselves can be absolutely terrifying with the LSATS, you are fingerprinted, read a riot act, seated with 50 equally stressed people to wait for someone to inevitably rip up his or her test or, even worse, crack up and start bawling in the exam room. Plus, the application processes are expensive, long and difficult. And then, of course, you spend the second half of your senior year ‘waiting’ and ultimately must choose a school you can pay for, commit to and spend the next few years of your life at.

All in all, the entire process leads me to believe that whoever said ‘senior year is easy’ obviously did not apply to law school.