If anyone tells you the high school process in New York City is relatively painless, don’t believe them. Would you believe someone who told you they breezed through high school and loved every moment of it?

Essays, interviews, test and portfolio preparation and auditions eat up nights and weekends for you and your 13-year-old. Taking tours (when you remember to sign up and aren’t shut out) guarantees being late for work. Open houses mean waiting on line. As the deadline (Dec. 2) approaches, another parent’s opinion may have to substitute for real information.

Students can list up to 12 choices, although they’ll get just one offer. Students are assigned to high schools based on how they rank them and how they are ranked by the schools. Harvard University’s Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons, whose territory includes New York City, told me he’s always known “that it’s much more difficult to get into any school in New York than it is to get into Harvard.’’ I’m sure I’ll be better at this by the time we are looking for colleges, but I feel like I fell down on the job this fall: We are putting three high schools on the list that we hope would be acceptable, based on reports from Insideschools.org, even though we couldn’t make the tours.

Conversations around lists and rankings are starting to sound remarkably familiar and repetitive. For example, if Beacon really is everyone’s first choice for a non-specialty high school, can what they are doing please be replicated and spread out a bit? After all, Beacon received 4,600 applications last year for just 262 spots. New York City parents are willing to do the hard work of finding, touring, ranking and then supporting good public high schools -- as long as we are assured of having good choices. Schools that offer a rich program of arts, clubs and sports, along with plenty of advanced courses and an enthusiastic staff will naturally have enormous appeal to both parents and to kids. High schools likeMillennium, where the student tour guides gushed about how happy they are, made a huge impression. Schools with overcrowded classrooms where we watched students doze through lessons were less appealing, as was a school where kids appeared to be working extremely hard but never cracked a smile.

With choice comes the hope that you will find a good fit for your child at a time when fitting in counts enormously. High school can be a really painful time, and in case you don’t recall, try renting some old films about high schools like the 1985 John Hughes classic “The Breakfast Club.’’ Stereotyped characters are all there: the jock, the nerdy geek, the popular beauty queen, the angry misfit. The giant suburban Illinois high school in "The Breakfast Club" has little in common with the kinds of schools we’ve been touring in New York City, but the harrowing and heartfelt pain of trying to fit in seemed instantly recognizable. And after all the hard work we’ve done already, no matter where any of our kids end up, they’ll have to figure it out.