Junior year has been a doozy! It has been hard, but my kid has almost survived it with her GPA intact. My morning mantra is, “Its her life, its her life,” and we try to stay out of it, knowing we have no control. However, going into the application process with our first born, we can’t help but be anxious. I probably need a College Confidential intervention. Any advice from the experienced parents out there?
College is a means to an end and NOT the end.
Be the best parent you can be to the child you’ve raised, not the child you could have had. It’s easy being proud of the kid who is Val, winning awards left and right for “the best” your HS has ever produced, greatly beloved by teachers and administrators. Oh, and volunteering at the local hospital three times a week cheering up kids in the pediatric oncology ward.
It’s harder being proud and supportive of the ACTUAL kid in your home… but that’s your job right now. Help THIS kid launch, warts and all. Help THIS kid figure out the right level of intensity/leisure in his her life, gaining the kind of practical skills required to be an adult (read a subway map, make a dentist appointment, cook a meal, buy groceries while staying on budget, doing a load of laundry). Help THIS kid decide whether he/she is comfortable living at home and commuting while saving money for grad school, or wants to experience full on dorm life, knowing that will require modest loans and a job during the school year, plus summers.
I spent my kids younger years practicing my speech when one of them won a Nobel prize or an Oscar or a Pulitzer or a Guggenheim. CNN would call for my comments and I’d modestly say “she showed promise at such an early age- so while we are honored, it’s not a surprise”.
Ha! Adolescence kicks in and then the ambitious and focused kid turns into a surly teenager who wants to sit on the couch and watch the Game Show network all weekend.
Love the kid on the couch. Figure out how to get HIM/HER launched, and you can sit back and be proud- even if CNN isn’t calling to ask “how did you raise such an exceptional child?”
And when I say “stay out of it,” we try not to be overbearing about her studying, etc. or put undue pressure. I try to be there when she asks and keep a watchful eye when I think she is too stressed out. She is highly motivated and has ambitious goals, so we try to be encouraging without seeming like we expect too much. It is so hard with a teenager! One minute she needs us, the next minute we don’t understand a thing!
LOL, Love your thread title. If you think junior year is bad, just wait…D’s senior year was crazy with college visits and applications, proms (or not), IB exams, GS Gold project. It was really, really stressful for everyone.
I say, enjoy the blissful ignorance of junior year. Senior year IS worse, but because we thought junior year was supposed to be the worst, senior year doesn’t seem as bad in a strange way. I am guessing this is because there really is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that light is no more high school, ever again.
I am publicly apologizing to my kid for hassling her mercilessly about getting her apps in, etc… Try not to do what I did:-)
If the college application process doesn’t kill you, you still have to survive the process of launching a child into the world and at the same time grieve the loss of pushing your child out of your nest. It is a tricky time for all involved.
Living each event in the school year “for the last time” is emotionally exhausting. Try to avoid phrasing things that way, especially around your child. And don’t make every conversation revolve around the college application process. Let your child have some fun. Maybe you can talk over the summer and decide that Sunday afternoons for 2 hours will be “college talk time” and give yourself a break the rest of the week.
You and your spouse need to present a united front regarding college questions/advice/criticism from family, friends, and random strangers. My advice is to keep the information you give out vague. No need to announce she is applying to Harvard and Yale, then have to tell folks later she didn’t get in. Same with majors, no need to rile up your MIL who thinks pre-med or pre-law is the only acceptable choice. Do NOT announce test scores, and I strongly encourage you to get your child to agree to this as well. Nothing good every comes from that kind of comparison.
You will need some kind of organizational system for keeping up with application deadlines, testing registration dates, extra applications for honors program or for scholarships. Some students do a fine job on their own, others need help. It is good to decide ahead of time how these responsibilities will be handled. And when you have a deadline, go ahead and make the deadline be 2 or 3 days before the ACTUAL deadline. I once had to drive to Fed Ex at 11:30 pm in my PJs to scan and email a document before a midnight deadline. NOT something I would ever wish to repeat.
Get your child to decide which teachers/pastors/coaches she will need to ask for recommendation letters. And then make sure she gets those requests in with minimum of THREE WEEKS advance notice. Teachers who get last minute requests do not write thoughtful letters!
Have you and your spouse had the Financial Talk with your child about how much you can afford to pay for her education? This is so important, and yet so often neglected. Right now on this forum are threads from students who are heartbroken because their parents are finally realizing they can’t actually afford the schools that they told their children it was okay to apply to. Don’t be that set of parents that breaks your child’s heart. Often, it is just ignorance or a refusal to actually sit down and run the numbers. Every college has a Net Price Calculator on their website so you can get an idea of what the cost will be for your family. If you are self-employed, just lost your job, divorced, your Net Price Calculator numbers may not be accurate.
And if you and your spouse have ANY restrictions on what you will or will not pay for, please tell your child now. If you won’t pay more than what your in-state public university charges, say it now. Don’t waste anyone’s time allowing your child to apply to a school you know you won’t let her attend. “No child of mine is moving across the country to go to college” “That school is too liberal/too religious/I hate their football team”
If your child’s college must be financed by Merit Scholarships, tell her now. That was the case for our D, and we knew going in that she would apply to in-state public as a safety, but that we were really going after small private LACs where her stats could get her higher amounts of merit aid. You can get more money from schools that are slightly lower in the rankings. There are lots of great schools out there, and if you can change your focus from “Only an Ivy is good enough for my child” you can figure out what school might be best for her.
Fit, distance from home, weather, urban vs rural, all these factors can influence whether your child likes a school or not. Getting her on campus to see and experience the different factors is a good way to spend time with her in these last months at home.
It is not a smooth road ahead, but if you can keep lines of communication open, you will make it just fine. Good luck!
DS is a senior, so I am experiencing all those “last times.” And it hurts. But I am thrilled that he was admitted ED to his first choice college, and relieved that he missed much of the anxiety of senior year.
My advice would be to identify a safety school early, a school that your child loves and has a good chance of getting into. This school for DS has a 30% admission rate, so not a safety by CC standards, but his grades and scores were high for them and we knew that he had a good chance there. His super-safety was an OOS flagship, one of the top state universities, where we knew he had a 100% chance of admission. (Naviance data was clear; there were grade and score thresholds above which everyone was admitted, no randomness, and his stats were well above the thresholds.)
My second piece of advice is to get the essays done early. Besides the CA essay, DS had to write 8 essays for his ED school, and 4 each for each of his EA schools. And he found that it wasn’t possible to re-use essays. He had RD applications ready, including essays, by the time the ED results came out, because we knew that it would not be possible to write good essays in two weeks, over holidays, while being depressed about rejections.
I think that the essays make a big difference. From what I’ve seen, many kids don’t allow enough time to do a good job on them. It was not uncommon for kids to get ED rejections and not have any essays even started for ED schools. I really think that essay quality is the hidden explanation for some seemingly random admission outcomes.
Agree with #5 to figure out the financial plan and cost constraints and discuss them with the student before the application list is made.
We’re gearing up to do this again as well, having weathered it with DS 3 years ago. Lots of good advice here already. One thing that is very important is to recognize that this is a marathon of sorts … you don’t want them to burn out too early. So, don’t OD on college stuff this summer if at all possible. Let this summer be not all about getting ready for applying to college … just like next summer needs to not just be all about getting ready to GO to college. Yes, read the common app essay questions at the beginning of the summer … let them percolate in their brains for at least June and July, as opposed to starting right away to work on drafts. Who knows what experiences they’ll have this summer that end up being the fodder for the essays? Do encourage your student to come up with a general plan for the schools they already know they want to apply to at the beginning of the summer. The benefit of that is that then they can circle the date on the calendar that they need to think about it again, and put it away and nobody has to worry about it until then. Unless you’re visiting schools, June and July can be mostly college-free zones. My DD has a fairly intense fall sports schedule, so for her, getting a jump on the apps in August will be helpful to making Sept - Oct manageable. Most of the schools she wants to apply to have fairly early deadlines for application for consideration for scholarships, so Nov. 1 is her target date to have everything done (we already discussed this during college visits when we were hearing the deadlines).
Do deliberately encourage independence and building skills in areas maybe they haven’t before – laundry, cooking a meal once a week or so, banking, using that driver’s license to go grocery shopping, etc… Get them a credit card (we did a savings secured credit card in DS’s name with us co-signed when he was 17) and have them start using it for paying for gas, etc… Sit down and go over the bill with them every month online. Transfer $ to them to pay for whatever portion you would normally pay for (e.g., for us, it was gas, since DS was driving himself and DD to school and practice every day, which was a big relief for us), but them have them go through the mechanics of actually paying it. It’s their senior year, but don’t be afraid to require them to help with more of the mundane stuff around the house, despite the fact that they’re busy with school and applications, etc… Okay, yes, rescue and pamper them some by making a lunch or switching their laundry, because that’s what we do and they’re only here a little longer … but let it be a treat and a bonus, not something they can count on. DS said the biggest adjustment of going to college for him was having to juggle absolutely everything about life, as well as school. And this was coming from a kid who did a sport every day after school and was responsible for cleaning his room weekly and doing his laundry on his own. And it was still a big adjustment. Might as well get them started easing into it…
And here’s the tricky part. While you’re busy stepping back and letting them handle stuff, turn up the gain on your Funny Business radar … don’t turn it down or off. You’ve gotten them this far, and it is easy to think they are fixed, known quantities at this point … but there is ALOT of change that goes on senior year. They know they’re leaving, and they start pushing away. You know they’re leaving, and you have to step back. They’re high on hormones and the thrill of independence and new abilities/freedoms, and the tantalizing and terrifying taste of Life ahead, and the kid you know and love IS capable of levels of utter stupidity that you have never seen any evidence of and you would swear right now they would never do. Same goes for their friends. So there still have to be rules. Still insist on knowing who/what/when/where/how. Stay up until they come home; have a conversation with them. Every time they go out, remind them you will come get them if they are uncomfortable or need a safe way to get home, no matter when, where, or why. Have very frank, specific discussions about alcohol and the dangers thereof; casually suggest specific strategies they can use to avoid overdoing it. I’m not saying condone it, but equip them with the specific things they can do if they are going to drink to keep themselves safe. Like, the idea that carrying around a beer in their hand all night is alot safer than swigging vodka out of a bottle (which is sheer stupidity, but is also what happens alot, particularly with boys). Or if they don’t want to drink and don’t feel like they can just say no, take a beer, go to the bathroom, and dump half of it out and refill with water. Look it up and do the math with them on how long it takes for their body to process alcohol; disabuse them of the idea that just because they went to sleep and woke up, now they are “fine” to drive. They have to think in terms of hours since their last drink, not whether they went to sleep or not. If you ever suspect something is up, don’t keep that to yourself. Have an adult conversation with them about it; don’t accuse, don’t lecture, but talk about it. None of the above is easy. It’s downright terrifying. But completely necessary.
^ Adolescent psychologist or social worker by chance?
No. Just battle wounds from watching DS and his friends navigate this time 3 years ago…
I like your advice 
All such GREAT advice! I’m old school and have printed the responses, hi-lighting the points I really like! THANKS!