<p>Interesting list! Were some things more helpful than others? Was counseling helpful?</p>
<p>Thank you, OP, for the latest update. Your sonās action plan is really lovely, I can sense that these were hard-won insights. Iām curious if your son did end up pledging a fraternity? (My son will be entering the same school as your son this fall, and during our college visits I got a sense that Greek life is an important part of the social fabric at this university.)</p>
<p>He did join the fraternity and lived in the house this year, which was probably part of the issue! Which school is your son in? mine is in engineering, which is notoriously tough.</p>
<p>Just read this list to D1, and she thought it was great. One additional suggestion she had was if a student plans to study in the library after dinner, take their books to dinner and go straight there. She says if you go back to the dorm, you WILL lose an hour of study time, and maybe never get to the library at all.</p>
<p>Just saw this thread, S was put on probation in an ivy engineering program after one very bad semester sophomore year. He never studied in hs, didnāt do much homework, just aced all the tests,perfect SATs etc, etc. Actually they wanted him to take at least a semester off, but H pointed out he still had a 2.3 gpa. It was a combination of things- he really didnāt want engineering, he should have majored in math. He was able to switch to the math engineering, so that helped a lot. Spectrum & executive function issues & attention issues- once we got those addressed as much as we could he ended up graduating and has a great job. Unfortunately it really tanked his overall gpa, I think it was a 2.9 at graduation which was a bummer as it would have been better to have at least a 3.0 I think he was able to say it was a 3.0+ in his major or something. It did hurt him in his one application to grad school which was denied, but he really wasnāt too excited about that either.
So, even really smart kids can have trouble at ivies and anywhere for that matter, particularly if they donāt have great study skills. These larger schools donāt seem well equipped to deal with it. I donāt recall any help from them- tutoring, etc.</p>