Scroll up to your original post. If you see the orange pencil, click on that. If you have posted enough posts, you should be able to edit the post.
I added S28 to your subject title. Hope that’s OK.
1 Like
OP, your kid sounds terrific.
From what I have observed-- the KEY is “seeking support”. Kids flame out of college all the time- sometimes a college with excellent support, sometimes at a college where it’s available but a kid needs to be proactive, and sometimes it’s just a mismatch between what the parents and kid think is needed and what’s available.
Have you guys sat down to figure out how much “scaffolding” the family has been providing, and being realistic about how much will be available at college? I think that’s a necessary step. Professors are not going to show up in the dorm and wake your kid up for an 8 am lab or 9 am review session. The roommate is not going to take on the calendering, organizing, sequencing that a parent may have been doing- often without realizing. And Deans are not in the business of figuring out ahead of time that a review session conflicts with a lecture for a different class, and then reaching out to the professor to see if there can be an alternative time slot for those that can’t attend the original session.
Stuff crops up all the time in college; the “stuff” is often unpredictable yet very important. Yes, there are tutors and a learning center and an easy mechanism for scheduling a quiet room for testing and getting note-takers and video reviews of a missed lecture due to flu.
But the key is the student, not the infrastructure. College dorms today are a 24/7 festival of constant food delivery. Back in my day, a couple of the men would order Dominos at midnight and we thought that was terribly exotic. Now it’s sushi and dumplings and poke and burritos and fancy coffee drinks ALL NIGHT LONG. We didn’t have online poker and we couldn’t watch Friends or the Office on 3X speed just for giggles. And we didn’t have tik-tok and Insta and Hinge or Tinder for distractions.
If your kid understands his need for structure (study at the library after dinner until 11 pm, then a solid night’s sleep; three meals a day including protein; exercise and “touching grass” every morning, or whatever he needs) then that’s a great sign. But if the structure has been dad dropping off the forgotten lab report to the school office once week on his way to work and Mom turning off the internet at midnight to prod bedtime…you’ve got time to work on his independence.
The supports will be academic-- and not “adulting 101”.
He sounds fantastic!
10 Likes
I had thought of both but the overall schools don’t fit what OP is seeking. Nor does U of Arizona (including in size) which has the SALT program at an additional fee (something others will have too - fees). Marist is the appropriate size but little else.
This was such a valuable post and spot on. My last kid is a freshman at Georgia Tech currently, and she’s getting the same accommodations for ADHD that she got in high school – mostly extended time for testing, ability to test in a quiet environment, permission to record lectures, etc.
But yes, we provided a lot of scaffolding at home – she had a crazy schedule in high school, so I’d sit and make a list with her every weekend on what needed to get finished that weekend, and how to plan out the week ahead. Initially I was also helping her manage her time in hour-long blocks over the weekend. By senior year, she was keeping her own extensive lists in Google Keep (which both I and her older sister use and love), and I was no longer chunking her time.
But it wasn’t perfect – ADHD is very real no matter how well it’s managed. We had an epic meltdown fall semester senior year because she was in a rigorous capstone class working on a year-long project, and it went south pretty quickly. The kid is so bright, and she’s fantastic at knowing exactly what she needs to do. The execution, not so much.
GT is known for being rigorous, but she took classes this semester that would ease her in – English, Health/Wellness requirement, Psych 101, some kind of creativity seminar for her major, marching band, etc. The only class that’s posing a real challenge is Linear Algebra (she’s fine at math but it’s not her favorite) – and I’m holding my breath to see if she gets behind and then watches the videos online to catch up. It’s not possible to sail through any math class at GT without putting in actual effort, so we’ll see how it goes.
We talk on the phone once a week, and I’m still reminding her to do life things – “sign up to book a practice room for clarinet so you can use your Tues/Thurs mornings efficiently, fill out the housing application for next year, etc.”
But of course I’m not at school with her, so I have no idea if she’s doing her laundry or changing her sheets or eating anything besides pizza for every meal. Nor do I know what needs to happen for every class like I did while she was at home – I only know what she tells me. It’s quite a transition for a parent used to managing a kid with ADHD!
4 Likes
This is all so true, and much appreciated. We are working on it. I’d say he’s somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. A gap year is highly likely as well, to work on independence.
1 Like
Just wanted to say that @AustenNut gave some really good suggestions of mid-sized places with good linguistics programs.
Western Washington, in particular, is an underappreciated gem of a campus that’s teaching- and student-focused in good ways, and their lx program has a really good reputation.
And yes, I had forgotten Lawrence in my list of small LACs with lx programs that offer merit aid.
Also, my C25 is at Hofstra, an additional mid-size university that offers really solid merit aid and has a good lx program. They also have the ordinary disability supports, plus an extra (but not huge) cost program that provides one-on-one support for students with learning disabilities and/or ADHD. My child, who’s double-majoring in lx and math, went with Hofstra both because the merit aid was generous and because it’s one of the few places in the US where an undergrad has a chance of getting solid experience in corpus lx (and one of maybe three that’s well-known for forensic lx).
3 Likes