Advice Please - College Choices

mikemac
Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:45:26 +0000

why not have your D call the health-sciences advisor at Georgetown and ask some questions directly about how students have prepared for speech pathology grad programs at Georgetown, how many students have done it recently, etc? She can also ask to be put in contact with a current student (junior or senior level) doing what she wants; if the advisor doesn’t know of any, this tells you something too.

This approach does a few things. First, it lets your D take ownership of her future, as opposed to having her highly motivated and trained secretary do it for her (eg. her parents); while its hard to hand these things off to the kids, keep in mind that in 6 months she’ll be the one taking the classes and working with the advisor, so she might at well get a feel for it now.

Second, it will give immediate feedback before admission as to how responsive (“user-friendly”, if you will) the school will be; if her calls are never returned or her concerns are brushed off, that speaks volumes as to what it would be like as an enrolled student.

Third, consider the possibility that your D may change her career goals. This is pretty common, a lot of kids enter college determined to enter career A but that’s only because they have never thought of B thru Z. If your D doesn’t have first-hand exposure to the field as either a patient or thru some other means, I’d think of her choice as more an “inclination” than a “decision”