Why do you come (What keeps you coming back) to the College Confidential?

College Confidential Community
1

I struggled with the whole application process two years ago, then I was lucky enough to get into the college and program I like and I’ve been studying here for almost 2 year now. However, thinking about my life back in the day when I was using forums like College Confidential, I still feel overwhelmed. I don’t know it was just me (I am a first gen) or you guys feel the same…

  1. There are large amount of disorganized information here and you need to sort it out by yourself, which always spends a lot of time and energy. I am not a big fan of forum, but I guess I just don't know what are the alternatives.
  2. I have to wait a long time for someone to reply to me... And to be honest, I don't know how much I should trust their answer...
  3. Maybe emotional support for each other is important along the application road?

Anyone want to say something about the reason why you come to the College Confidential and what information you found super helpful in here?

2

I discovered CC after my kid hit 99th percentile on the 10th grade PSAT and started researching NM, I didn’t even know what is was at the time. On CC I learned about summer programs, scholarships, colleges, etc that I had never heard of.

Now, I’m just addicted, but I’ve learned so much that I’m a resource to friends and family.

3

I forget how I initially discovered CC, but I didn’t make an account until I was applying to colleges, where I pretty much just did a chance me thread before leaving forever. I would browse a little bit without logging in every so often, but I didn’t come back full force until after November, when I got pulled into the NaNoWriMo forums. I forgot how fun forum-type sites were, and NaNo was over, so I moved back here.

I’m not sure how much I learned at CC except that my admission was a weird fluke (on paper I looked a lot worse than lots of the deferred and rejected students, but I had a couple unusual spikes that I guess put me over the top?), but I’m trying to give back with advice to prospective students. The Ivies, especially, are quite the rumor mill, and I think it’s nice to have a current student talk about what it’s actually like.

4

College Confidential was really helpful to me in learning about colleges. Besides each college’s website and brochures, and popular college guides, CC added to my knowledge about each college by helping me learn about the “tone” of each college. I saw what students, alumni, and parents of each college valued most about the college, and what they and visitors found most troubling about each college. I compared these to the other sources and shared the info with my son, who narrowed his list enough to pick colleges to visit. Early visits refined his list further.

College Confidential was one of my favorite resources during the college search. It was really, really helpful.

And I was able to indulge my obsessive rumination about the college admissions process without passing on too much of that anxiety to my son. I was thinking about college all the time. I didn’t want him to be thinking about college all the time. I wanted him to be out having fun learning in class, being a part of clubs and sports, and hanging out with his friends. So, instead of talking to him about colleges constantly (or to my husband, who found the whole process made him too anxious), I posted constantly on CC.

Now, I remain on the site mainly out of a desire to “give back” by helping future students. I like to help others learn from my experiences, and I like to calm anxious students and parents and help them both to understand the process better and to relax a little and remember to enjoy the high school experience.

When my son was a baby and toddler, I was a passionate advocate for responsive parenting. (Dr. Sears, etc.) Now that my kid is a high school senior, I am a passionate advocate for letting a kid be a kid during high school.

But there is also an element of habit. I checked College Confidential for months, and it feels weird not to continue with this activity. It is the only social media I’ve ever really used, and it is somewhat addictive and feels like you have relationships of a sort with frequent posters. I will have to see whether I will continue with this site, or eventually let go of it and move onto another hobby. I think the latter, but I am not there yet. Unless I am helping CC monitor the Williams site or something, maybe I will leave after May 1st, when all my son’s friends have been admitted to and chosen their colleges, and their parents stop asking me for advice.