<p>My son is a procrastinator when it comes to his homework, paper writing, test preparation, etc. etc. He is a white kid from CA. He wants to major in Mechanical Engineering. Did it get better when your son or daughter, of similar work habits, went off to college? He is applying to: </p>
<p>Stanford
Columbia
Cornell
Rice
Northwestern
Michigan
Cal
UCLA
UCSD
USC
Washington (safety)
Cal Poly (safety)
Santa Clara (safety)</p>
<p>Please give me some guidance as to what schools might be more suitable for my son knowing his current stats and that he gets things done at the last minute, or, is he typical of the profile/work habits of many Ivy/Ivy Equivalent-interested kids? </p>
<p>His stats are decent: GPA 3.7uw, 4.5w, 2220 SAT I (800m, 760w, 660cr-plans to retake test again in the fall and is being currently tutored in cr, that he is paying for) 800 Math 2, 720 Eng SATII. 5's AP Euro Hist and Eng. and a 4 on Physics. He's a full IB candidate with a monster workload. Outstanding AB Calc. award as a junior taking BC Calc. in the fall and another year of Physics. Captain of JV tennis team, Academic athlete award, AP Scholar of Distinction (NOT a Natl. Merit Semi), V.P. NHS, Mock Trial, all 3 years for each. Eagle scout and will have about 500 hours of community service by next fall (not the 1000 that was stated in my original post).</p>
<p>If your son is a procrastinator with iffy study habits, how is he managing all the stuff he’s doing now?</p>
<p>If it only works with a lot of parental prodding … then you are right to worry about college. Your son is unlikely to develop self-management skills that he doesn’t already have. </p>
<p>If he seems to be doing o.k. now on his own – and it’s just that his habits drive you crazy, but it all seems to work out for him in the end – then I’d say the outlook would be good. Compared with the schedule he is managing in high school, college should seem easy.</p>
<p>Thanks for your “seasoned” advice, calmom. As far as school work goes, prodding him doesn’t seem to have any positive effect-- it just creates a lot of tension, and he moves to the beat of his own drummer anyway. Playing the “leverage card” works (“you can go out to a movie with a friend when X is completed”), but we don’t like to play it this way knowing that he will be off on his own, away at school, in short order. So I feel somewhat encouraged, based on your last paragraph, but still am wondering if an Engineering student in college will have to develop much better time management skills than he currently exhibits.</p>
He’ll definitely need good study skills to do well in engineering at a school with a rigorous engineering program (UCLA and UCSD are two of them). There can be a large amount of work to do and there’s no hand-holding. In addition, the students are often faced with roommates who are taking much less rigorous majors who have a lot of free time and hence can be distractions. </p>
<p>When he goes to a college like this it’s no longer HS. Picture the entire student body of the campus being comprised only of the top 3% or thereabouts of the HS students - the competition and curves go up.</p>
<p>At the point he goes to college the ball will be in his court. He’ll have to do it on his own. Many students step up to the challenge and manage to take their own initiative when they know they can’t just kick back until the parents prod them. Some other students don’t do so well and have a moment of truth when they discover they’re not doing so well if they don’t do the work. The latter sometimes don’t have a great first quarter but sometimes manage to turn it around now that they realize they need to step up the game. Others decide not to do the work and switch majors out of engineering to something that requires less work. </p>
<p>The only thing a parent can do is to consider your job done once he heads off to college and let him proceed on his own and succeed or fail as the case may be. Provide moral support but realize he’s not in K-12 anymore and needs to do this himself.</p>
<p>In the end, most that end up at the ivies/peers have the necessary work ethic, they are very able to pick out the kids that do.</p>
<p>As long as he’s happy and doing this well, I’d just let things land where they do. As long as Michigan, Santa Clara and the other safeties are financial safeties for you, you’re fine.</p>
<p>Red, is Michigan really considered a safety for my son’s profile? He really liked the Engineering program there when we visited last summer, but I was beginning to think it was a low to mid reach. Very pricey for a state school (OOS status) but, thankfully, manageable.</p>
<p>I’m just saying that he has a tremendous amount of disparate activities on his plate right now – all the EC’s & athletics are time consuming, each with their own demands – on top of a killer academic schedule. So it may be that the intense demands makes him look less organized and more prone to procrastination than he would be without all that stuff – after all, there are only 24 hours in a day and he is going to have to prioritize, letting some stuff slide while he attends to something else. There’s no other way to manage all that stuff.</p>
<p>I’d be a lot more concerned if the “so-so study habits” meant that he was playing video games when he needed to be studying – but it sounds more like this kid is doing community service or practicing tennis or prepping for Mock Trial when he really needs to be studying. If he recognizes when he gets to college that he will need to shift priorities - and doesn’t decide that he’s got to join 8 different clubs and rush a fraternity his first semester – then he should be o.k. To manage everything he’s got going right now takes some excellent skills, even though it might look a muddle to parents who don’t quite agree with his choices when it comes to prioritizing or scheduling. </p>
<p>That’s why I think its so important to look at the parental role in all of this. The parents won’t be there at college to manage, nag, or complain. But some of the stuff that drive parents nuts when their high schoolers do it (like starting homework at 11 pm and staying up until 3am) – is what is “normal” for college students. So if the kid is managing everything he’s got now following the beat of his own drummer – even if it seems unorthodox – I wouldn’t worry. </p>
<p>I’d be the first to sound the alarm in other circumstances – its just that this particular kid sounds like an unusual high achiever. He can’t possibly be managing everything he’s got right now unless he’s doing something right.</p>
<p>OP:
D just finished her freshman year at Stanford. She sounds very much like your son. Over-scheduled and a procrastinator. She has managed to do very well academically, have a very active social and service-related life. I just asked her if she still considers herself a procrastinator. She just smiled and said “Of course”. I asked her how she manages everything and she said “You just figure it out”. If he is willing to take on schools of this intensity, he will figure it out.</p>
<p>Calmom, wow that’s it… homework from 11p to 3a or even pulls an all-nighter once or twice per week when paper due or test. Will usually sleep when he gets home from school or practice from about 6p to 11p and then do his homework. That’s if he doesn’t have Mock Trial or Boy Scouts… On weekends he sleeps, sleeps, sleeps, except when he’s working from 9:30p until !:30a doing Safe Rides… Homework over the weekend usually gets started around the usual time (11p)</p>
<p>MD Mom, watching IS painful!!!</p>
<p>Emgamac, thanks for telling me what your daughter says about just figuring it out. He more than likely is/will also…</p>
<p>Oddly, it did, in our case. I think there were a couple of reasons for this: First, D understood that without Mom standing over her with a bullwhip, she was on her own to get her work done, and by golly, she rose to the occasion. It turns out that all those lectures about managing her time got lodged somewhere deep in her brain – not in evidence as long as she was at home, but ready to be pulled out when needed. She still had a couple of all-nighters in her first year at college, but I never did hear the stress and panic in her voice that were a frequent occurrence at home.</p>
<p>The other factor was that the sheer time demands dropped off dramatically in college. On a typical senior-year day, she was in school until 3, then off to various ECs. Factor in commute time and dinner, and she often couldn’t even begin homework until 9 pm. By contrast, at college she had 2-4 hours of class per day, a couple of hours at her job, maybe an hour or two with her club – which left a whole bunch more study time than she had in high school.</p>
<p>That said, she will never be as organized as I’d like her to be, but she did really well academically as a freshman, so I guess it works for her.</p>
<p>I know plenty of people who were like that in high school and they manage to pull 4.0’s at very difficult schools (GaTech, Emory, Duke). When I ask them how they’re able to get all A’s in all their difficult schools, they make it clear that it’s not at all like high school and they really had to take responsibility.</p>
<p>It seems like once you get out there on your own you feel very free but at the same time you realize that it’s your chance to prove to your parents and everyone else who never respected you as a teenager (most teenagers aren’t respectable so it’s understandable) that you can handle yourself (like you’ve been telling them all along). I find it pretty bizarre actually, even in my own case. I get home from classes and either read/study or start my homework, and if I’m going out then I get it done when I come back first thing. My parents are pretty good about me going out and coming in late since I’m going to college far away in the fall, but so far I have A’s in my classes and they see that I’m taking care of stuff (which, for me, was very unlike high school).</p>
<p>The freedom makes you realize that you have a lot of responsibilities, I think. He’s obviously pretty bright and will figure out that he has to get serious now. If not, he’ll get walloped by the first pop quiz/test and usually that makes people get their stuff together.</p>
<p>Hard to say. Right now your son is probably at the top of his game. If accepted to a top flight engineering program that is very selective, he is going to be average in that group. He may not be able to keep up with the work and do well when given assignments that are aimed at that caliber of a student. That’s when one finds out if the student has that oomph that takes him out of that old procrastination mode and revs up to meet the challenge. Some kids do that. Others do poorly and have to drop out or change majors. Can’t say where you’r son will fall. The drop out rate including changing the major for engineering type courses is among the highest of all disciplines.</p>