I have decided on the college my parents wanted me to go to, and it is not where I want to spend the next four years. I will probably come across as dramatic and whiney, but I feel overwhelmingly sad. I don’t want to go into details, but the entire admissions process has been a disappointment at every turn. I feel that my hard work and the sacrifices I have made as a student so far have been absolutely worthless. I know I am going to a good school, and I am making my parents proud, which are things that matter a lot to me, but I still feel crushed. There is a school I wanted to go to that costs about the same as my state school (where I’m going), but it is in Canada, and my parents have been entirely unsupportive of it. I can’t really blame them for not wanting me to go away, but my mother in particular seems to have done everything in her power to keep me from achieving something that is a dream for me. Financially, I can’t expect too much of her, but some of her words have hurt me more than I can say, and I just can’t take it anymore. I’m not going away just to lose my family’s support, because I don’t have anyone else. I don’t want to spend four years (or many more) feeling like my parents hate me over a choice I’ve made.
My life feels really pointless right now. I can remember when I couldn’t wait for college, but the process has lost all its joy. I have struggled a lot with my mental health lately, and I just want to feel happy about something. I am finding it very difficult to accept the reality that I cannot go to Canada, but I want to move on and learn to love the school I have chosen. I have visited that campus several times and done a lot of research. I would try to get excited about my dorm, but that’s another thing that hasn’t worked out. Housing is very limited and I was picked next to last in the lottery for registration times, so I may not even get to live on campus. I tried researching some study abroad programs and that has made me a bit more enthusiastic, but I guess I’m not very good at getting over things. This turned out long, sorry. If anyone has any advice, please let me know. I am about to graduate high school, and I am so tired of feeling miserable.
I’m not sure I can offer much advice but I know that things will work out for you . It may not seem like that right now but keep moving forward no matter how small the steps may be. No matter what school you end up at you have the opportunity to make your blank canvas a beautiful masterpiece . Take control , being sad and resentful is not going to chance anything . It will just intensify the pain. Celebrate the positive things about the school . You are destined to be where you end up … you never know your future husband or wife might be waiting for you at the school your parents want you to go to . All your hard work and sacrifices were indeed worth it !
- You are going to college!
- Are your parents paying for this college? The undeniable fact is that in the US Higher Education system, it is assumed that your parents will be heavily involved in paying for your college. You cannot take loans (other than Fed Direct loans) without them cosigning a loan. So you are reliant on them. If they are paying, just consider this the "price" you have to pay to get a higher education.
- All of your life you have been under the control of your parents...soon you will find you are an adult who can make their own decisions. (once you graduate). Then you can go to grad school where you want and work where you want and live where you want.
- Now it seems like there are vast differences between different colleges...but really they are not that different. Figure out what you liked about the Canadian college and try to see what you can find that is similar to your college.
- There is more to college than just classes...get involved with professors and research and clubs and activities.
- Tell your mom to buy you the sweatshirt. Read about the college and their traditions...read about fun things to do in the town.
- If you go to college complaining about it and hating it, your attitude will come across and people may not want to hang with you.
Join the social media pages for admitted students.
Wear your school’s swag.
Start picking out dorm decor.
If you think you would benefit from talking to a counselor about your mental health, do it now.
Your hard work in HS is not for nothing. It is going to set you up for success in college!
Love that you are already researching study abroad. Those can be great experiences.
Bloom where you are planted!
I’m so sorry for you that your parents are pressuring you somewhere you don’t really want to go; although their reasons might be understandable, I can see how this would make you feel down. I agree with the others that you should find the things you’ll like, as you are already doing, and I am sure once you are on campus and swept up in the excitement of actually starting college, you’ll feel better. However also, given this background, remember that colleges offer counseling services, and know where to find them if you are having difficulty settling in once you get there. Good luck.
Please understand that many students do not end up at their first choice college for a variety of reasons (financial, geographic limits set by parents, not accepted etc.). You are not alone. I agree with the advice above. But the bigger things is that mentally you have to stop looking behind at what “could have” been and start looking ahead with a focus on your future.
The positive things is that you will be going away to a 4 year college – a privilege that many thousands of people across the US and the world would do almost anything to have. What you do/what your expereince will be once you get to college is largely on you – so look for courses and professors that interest you, look for clubs and EC you want to join etc. Understand that the hard work you have done in HS will set you up for success.
And please do not ignore any mental health issues – see a counselor if you can. And know that once you get to college there is free counseling so take advantage of that.
I think you need to follow up on your feelings of depression. If you struggle with mental health issues, maybe being a long distance from home isn’t the best idea at this time. Assume the best of your parents given their resources and desire you to support you.
Try to embrace your chosen school. My kid is not jumping for joy at his likely final school either. Trust you’ll find your people and your place and jump in.
Wow. I am so sorry you feel this way. Hugs to you!!!
Take your post here and copy it into a letter to your mom. If my daughter said those words to me, it would make a truly powerful and impactful statement.
Had you been rejected and had no choice, as painful as rejection is, you’d have closure and you’d have been forced to move on. And if the choice was taken away from you by financial realities, you could reasonably expect to come to terms with that too. But you had a viable choice - one among the first significant ones of your young adult life - and it was taken from you. So in your case that probably felt like a betrayal of sorts (even loving parents can make mistakes), bound to cause a deep fissure in your relationship with them. That fissure is going to affect a whole lot of other things such as your mental health, your excitement about college, and the bittersweet joy of the last month of high school.
So I think it is important that you show this to your mother to open up a dialog with the ultimate goal of mending of the relationship. If you can’t bring it up with your mom, at least print out this thread and show it to your guidance counselor. I think if you can get some help healing the relationship with your immediate family, that a lot of things are going to start to look up, regardless of what school you end up attending.
FWIW, I completely understand this.
(and great advice from others above)
I feel for you. My close HS friend went to McGill U. I went to the least expensive option, but they took college credits so I could graduate in 3 years. At 17-18 y.o., we learn to,compromise. Truly, you don’t know if this Canadian college would be as great as you imagine. There are many people on CC who can’t wait to transfer after a year. A common denominator is that they went far from home.
To a great extent college is what you make of it. I’m sure the school you will be attending will have lots of opportunities for you to get involved and take advantage of. Grieve if you must but then go to the website, look at clubs, research opportunities, sports/theater etc options, whatever your interests are. If possible join those groups’ FB pages or follow them on Instagram and begin to own your experience. Find your place and your people.
Perhaps there are some different ways to think about college that could help get you out of the hole you are in, in terms of your thinking.
Sounds like you don’t think you will be happy in this school. You think you will be happier in the Canadian school. You are also worried about the living situation and whether you will be able to live in the dorms. Naturally you think the dorms would be better but you are unlikely to get into one (thereby making them all the more appealing cause you think they are out of reach-cognitive biases are mean-we like best the club that won’t take us).
Well here is the thing, what ends up being influential in terms of the quality of the college experience and whether you’ll some day look back at your college years as the happiest or not is probably not what you think. We like to believe we have a good idea about what influences us and that those things are predictable. We figure those lucky to get admitted to and attend their choice of college have won the jackpot in terms of being able to control the most important variables that will lead to a happy college experience.
But that’s a false belief. Often what has the most influence in the long run are idiosyncratic, uncontrollable and unpredictable variables like who happens to get the room next to the one you are assigned, or whether you end up in a room that is in a busy part of a dorm or apartment building or more isolated. In terms of our appraisal of our experiences, it’s not whether you landed at Duke or State U. It’s about variables you’d least expect. Yet, those kind of variables can have a greater impact on the experience then the ones you’d expect would.
For example, most people are concerned about making new friends at their school and being “successful” socially. A study conducted a very long time ago (I think by Lott& Lott but not sure) was designed to identify the factors responsible for a satisfying social life in early college. And what were they? It came down to surprisingly basic factors most people would give almost no thought to- like where a student’s room was in the dorms… Students who had rooms close to the elevators and near lounges and other places students tend to congregate had more satisfying social circles than those placed in more remote, quieter areas. Can you believe it? It wasn’t some monumental factor but it made a big difference.
So it’s actually these small incidental things that you can’t really control or foresee that can have a significant impact on how good an experience a student has in college. If you ask someone years later how they liked their first year in college and why, most people don’t mention factors about the college itself as being influential. Rather, they may say that they had a crappy or great roommate or the dorms were too loud so they spent the first year of college sleep deprived.
Of course right now you are not being impacted by a great roommate and you’re not hanging in a lounge with a bunch of friends. You won’t have any idea what the social situation will be like for you until you go to college. So until then, you are stuck with the abstract things you do know about-that you’d rather be in Canada than in the school you will probably be attending. So you are playing up the differences in your head which is making you miserable. So instead, remind yourself that you have no way of knowing about the factors that will end up being most influential for you but they won’t be those you are obsessing over right now. Your cognitive biases are playing tricks on you. Don’t let them.
What Canadian uni are you pining for?
All the renown ones are gigantic sink-or-swim underfunded (compared to the US) publics with generally huge freshman classes. May still be a good deal, sure, but why is it your dream school?
I too am curious what is better about the Canada school…my DD was easily swayed by superficial things colleges had rather than what really mattered.
My D’19 was drawn by the allure of going somewhere cool, new, and different from everyone else. When it became obvious the best fit by several measures was 1.75 hours away, she was not happy. Desperate, at times, not to go there. Even though it has a good reputation in our area, she was biased against it because it’s normal and a handful of kids from school go there every year. Now, she is excited to go there.
Things that helped:
Talking to her alumni aunts who loved it
Having a good initial visit and a great experience at their scholarship interview day
Connecting with future classmates on social media and seeing that while it is local, it is still a big world
Visiting with professors who got her excited
Going through the course catalog and finding interesting classes in her major
Becoming closer with schoolmates who are also going there- and deciding it might be alright to have a few friends around instead of all strangers
Realizing she is GOING TO COLLEGE
Visiting a far away school and experiencing first hand the travel hassle involved (and thinking about storing or transporting stuff over summer break, etc.)
Getting more sentimental about home and friends and knowing there she can come home whenever
Looking at study abroad
Planning to live someplace cool after college is over
I hope you can get excited too, DD is much happier now that she has made peace with the decision.
How do you move on? Life moves you on! You’ll be going to a new environment. You are going away to college. If you live off campus, it’s a lot more like the Canadian college experiences as many of the Canadian schools have very limited dorms. The American campus is something quite different from most country’s university experiences.
You will be very busy once you get there. A whole new world. You are very lucky to get a sleep away experience. Congratulations in getting a college experience in the bag.
OP- big hug to you.
Couple of thoughts-
1- I loved college. I didn’t love everything about it, but overall, I was pretty happy. But looking back- there would have been 50 colleges I would have loved- some things would have been better, some things worse, but I could have loved the experience in a wide range of places.
2- The things I thought would happen which would make me love college did not happen. I didn’t date much in HS and I thought college would be different- and it wasn’t. I was never a party person, so in my fantasies I was a party person in college- and that didn’t happen. My social life was mostly doing things with small groups of friends-- just like in HS. Admittedly- most of the time they were MORE interesting things because college campuses have lots of action and it’s easy to roll out of bed and go to a drumming performance that your roommate is in, or go to a poetry reading that someone in your lit class is giving. But it was still me, a few friends, and not the humungous social life you see in the movies.
3- my classes were awesome (which is why I’ve concluded that I would have loved college in lots of lots of places.). You just can’t run out of interesting things to study, cool books to read, fascinating professors to talk to, and endless libraries to explore. Colleges have rare book rooms, and archives of ephemera, and collections of rare musical instruments and interesting artwork you’ve never learned about. There’s a strange looking WW1 Memorial on campus and a professor tells you about a group of alums who died in France during WW1 and makes it come alive. Or a beautiful sculpture outside a dining hall made by a famous artist, and the guy in the lunch line tells you that the artist donated it to the college as a thank you after giving a talk-- in the middle of a snowstorm- where 500 people showed up and braved the horrible weather.
4- My dorms were all awful. I loved living away from my parents and family so i didn’t care that they were crummy and shabby and some were in terrible locations.
5- I worked really, really hard which set me up for lots of good things once I got out of college.
I share this to help you pivot from “The college I can’t attend is the college I was meant to be at” to “I’m going to love college”. When you are having an attack of “my mom is so mean to squelch my dreams”, open the course catalog of the college you are going to, pick a random department (Russian Studies? Urban Planning? Art History?) and browse the courses. That’s going to be you next year- reading Lenin, or learning how transportation grids are developed, or understanding why French society was scandalized by the early impressionists. That’s going to be you!
And it doesn’t matter where that you is situated. Every college kid gets homesick, or lives in a terrible dorm, or doesn’t have as many friends as they think they should have. But the work/courses/intellectual engagement is going to be so exciting! And that’s going to be you!!!
First of all, it’s totally okay to feel sad and depressed right now. A lot of seniors go through a post-admissions letdown, even if they get to attend their first choice of school, and for students like you who are unhappy with the outcome, naturally you’re going to be depressed about it and feel like all your hard work was for nothing.
So it’s okay to feel like that. Be kind to yourself and tell yourself that you’ll start to feel better after a while.
Second, what everyone else has said is correct – the reality of your college experience is going to depend on a lot of factors, very few of which you have control over. It sounds like you are trying to have a positive attitude, which is a huge part of the battle. You also seem very self-aware about your own situation and how lucky you are in the grand scheme of things. I am sure that you will come out of this in a positive place eventually.
In the meantime, what are your plans for summer? Do you have anything fun to look forward to? If not, try to find something fun you can do, even if you have to work or have other commitments you have to fulfill. You worked hard in high school and you deserve to treat yourself this summer, and I hope you can.
@blossom such a wonderful post. Thank you for this!!
"I share this to help you pivot from “The college I can’t attend is the college I was meant to be at” to “I’m going to love college”. When you are having an attack of “my mom is so mean to squelch my dreams”, open the course catalog of the college you are going to, pick a random department (Russian Studies? Urban Planning? Art History?) and browse the courses. That’s going to be you next year- reading Lenin, or learning how transportation grids are developed, or understanding why French society was scandalized by the early impressionists. That’s going to be you!
And it doesn’t matter where that you is situated. Every college kid gets homesick, or lives in a terrible dorm, or doesn’t have as many friends as they think they should have. But the work/courses/intellectual engagement is going to be so exciting! And that’s going to be you!!!"
@blossom Your whole post was amazing, but these last two paragraphs… wow. <3
What is it that you like about the Canadian college versus the school your parents want?
What are your parents’ reasons for not wanting you to go to the Canadian college?
Were you already dealing with depression before or is your depression related specifically to the college situation?
I feel as if I need more info before commenting.
There ARE other options like deferral, gap year and so on particularly if you are dealing with mental health issues. Perhaps if those are under control your parents would let you go to Canada next year, but I am only speculating. You did say the cost is the same.