Tell me about your Master's/grad school application experience

Welcoming any ramblings about what your experience was like, anything you're worried about, anything cool you've found, any advice you wish to pass on.

I'm going into my last year of school, and I haven't really been considering grad school at all so far. I have pretty mediocre grades (67%), failed math twice and chem once. But I kind of got a sudden opportunity to be first author on a paper in one of my labs.

I've also done two research courses that have papers I can publish in the undergraduate research journal (alledgedly they take literally anything). It's also possible that my first author paper becomes two different ones (destined for a mid level journal) and I want to try and do one more undergrad research course before I graduate.

And I didn't know this before, but apparently in Canada having a published paper really helps out your application, and that for the first time, I might actually be able to go to grad school. It's one of those weird things for me, where people ask what I'm thinking about for my applications, and I lay out what I said above, and their eyebrows raise and they're like "damn" but I wasn't really expecting that. This is the first time people have started having that reaction to me ever.

But of course this means that I am super behind on knowing anything about grad school. I never went to any of the meetings on this kind of stuff. And I try to surf this sub and others to find stuff, but it's just so hard to try and figure out what's good information and what isn't when you don't have any context yet.

I swear this isn't a case of a researcher who doesn't know how to research, I have googled "how to get into grad school" a bunch of times now, but I feel like I'm missing the context of knowing anyone else who has gone on this path before. Like when people have siblings who have gone to the University before them and they know all the tricks.

So I just want to hear about your experience, whatever it is.