<p>@intparent- yayyyyyyyy!!!</p>
<p>I already have gray hairs!
Intraparent, it is good to hear “the other side”. It makes me hopeful. I worry too much about my S’16. </p>
Hello everyone. I wanted to thank you all for the support. My DS applied to 6 schools. Accepted at 4 (two with merit money), waitlisted one, and denied at another. He got into several very competitive schools and we are pleased with his final decision. Hang in there folks - it really can work out well. Thankful for nuerofeedback therapy and that my son was finally able to be himself (he came out to his father and I last February - getting that monkey off his back really allowed him to focus - I can’t image the pain of keeping a secret like that). He really has his act together now and is so passionate about what he wants to study. I know he will be successful.
Congrats on the acceptances! It’s nice you updated the thread. I’m glad neurofeedback helped.
Reminder - Getting accepted into college is only the first college battle. Do what you can to get him support (if needed) to survive the rigors or college academics / organization challenges.
WOHOO!!! @vamominvabeach Congratulations! and a question: how did you “organize” for the actual applications process for college? My S will be doing that this fall…and I am a little anxious about it. It may be all me…but any suggestions would be helpful thanks!
It was a little crazy here and there in the process. Start the essays early, towards the end of summer. Keep the application list manageable - ours started with just three applications, when the ED school deferred my son - I encouraged him to add three. So our total was 6. I helped when I could, to get things started. Otherwise son was in charge of getting his recommendations and transcript requests. I encouraged him to meet with his counselor to open those lines of communication, which was helpful. I did sometimes feel like a nag because I wanted to make sure things were getting done. I always checked behind him and was pleasantly surprised that things were getting done. I’m a bit of an organized control freak - so some of the issue was trusting he’d do what he said. 
@vamominvabeach, we have two kids who are gifted and have learning and organizational issues. Let me highlight the potential need for continuing help while such kids are in college, which you can’t easily provide. We got help for both in different ways in college. One was a coach who had worked with our son in middle/HS and continued to work with him in college. For the other, the school provided a peer coach, I believe, who was an older student in the same program. Both kids have graduated from college and in both cases, their organizational skills improved dramatically, but in different ways. Both are in grad school now and no longer need coaching.
I’m going to send you a PM with more information.
@vamominvabeach I’m a bit late to this discussion, but I, too, want to encourage your son to follow his passions, even as they change over time. That he HAS passions is very important, and forensics is a great one to have b/c it requires planning, research, writing, speaking, teamwork and so many other life skills. My son was a champion debater in high school, and now nearly years later the skills that he acquired there are important to hie career.
He was not, however, organized or planning oriented in many other activities. Fortunately his debate coach and the teacher in charge of the school newspaper (for which my son served as Opinion Editor) reminded him of his need to keep up with coursework. But homework? We never saw him doing it at home. He did it in school – Spanish in his English class, math in his Spanish class, etc. – and didn’t bring it home. It was a shock to us to discover in his backpack some of his papers, which were superbly well written and well received by his teachers.
That your son may have diverse interests is not to be discouraged. While he may appear scattered to you, I tend to look at this as his having broad interests. And he is young! Discovering his capabilities, defining his interests.
In our son’s case, he also had one driving extracurricular interest: fantasy baseball. This interest drove him to teach himself how to use spreadsheets, compute statistics on his teams. Ultimately, this interest in statistics (data) became the basis for his college major in economics.
Kids evolve. And “scattered” kids, i.e., kids who have multiple and perhaps evolving interests, are to be celebrated and encouraged. You never know what kind of career they will eventually take up. My son has had several, i.e., different phases in his post-college working career, that all can be traced to his broad intellectual roots. But we couldn’t have predicted where his career and life is now when he was in high school.