Junior year realizations & managing expectations [PA resident, <$38k]

Parents Forum
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Hi eccpbh! We are in the process of visiting colleges for my daughter as well and managing expectations is an important part of this process.

I wanted to comment on a couple different points you mentioned… you view your daughter as somewhat immature and she uses social media quite often, perhaps she’s developed a romanticized view of an urban college experience? Has she spent time in NYC? I believe you said you were there on 3 different occasions.

We lived in Manhattan for 12 years, all of our kids were born there. It’s an amazing place. It’s also very dirty, noisy, busy and unpredictable. And by dirty, I’m not talking about empty Red Bull cans and protein bar wrappers… I mean real filth (I’ll spare you the details). Someone mesmerized by cute reels may not like the reality and grit of city living. But that’s for the two of you to sort out.

I do also want to mention that your daughter’s social media use could be a very useful tool for this college search. My daughter has zero interest in social media. She’s never used it (except YouTube) and is a bit in the dark about colleges generally. I use Facebook and sometimes show her highlights of things she may find interesting. It sounds like your daughter would enjoy going to college in a vibrant environment, a place with good energy. Social media may be a good tool for the two of you to use.

Best of luck to you both. This is not an easy process. I am confused and overwhelmed on a daily basis :slight_smile:

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Haha this reminded me of the day I was in the W4th (nyu) subway station with D19 and we saw a GIANT rat running around on the platform! I’ve never quite heard her shriek like that lol.

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My kid was at USC and there were tons of rats at the main outdoor eating area. People got used to them but I was pretty upset.

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My daughter bartends in Boston, she’s learned to keep calm when they run over her feet. Her apartment just has mice (and a cat).

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Maybe look at St. Joes (Philly) and U of Scranton as well. Honestly with both of my kids I had to push them a little to keep an open mind and actually look at some schools. I truly think my kids didn’t know what they didn’t know and didn’t realize what other great schools there are where they could thrive besides the well known names.

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Hi…

I’m a little late to the discussion, but wanted to share our experience and suggestions.

• Your daughter will mature a lot of the next year. She is about to make the great leap during her senior year. Just keep talking and visiting schools.

• Plan to go visit schools as often as you can over the next 9 months. Even visiting schools that my daughter did not end up liking helped us narrow down her criteria, and the more schools we visited, the more she was able to articulate what she wanted. We visited one school that had a beautiful campus, great merit, etc., but the college is in the middle of nowhere and my daughter said “absolutely not.” She has to live there for 4 years—I don’t.

• Go over the money as many times as you have to until it sinks in. It took at least a year and a half for the money issue to sink
in for my daughter. It did not mean anything to her when I said “our budget is XYZ a year.” It impacted her when I said “this is how much money we have for your bachelor’s degree and you are not taking out a loan.” Somehow that made more of an impact. With teens, you never know what will finally get through to them.

• if your daughter’s goal is NYC, work with that. If you can’t work with that, try to find substitutes. My daughter’s one criteria was “nowhere in the Midwest.”

• I am a UCLA grad. My daughter would love to go there, or at least to UCSD or UCSB. No matter how many times I looked at it, the money was off for us. You know how she got over it? Not the 9% acceptance rate. Not the cost of tuition or rent. I told her to look up the gas prices in Southern California and that was that. Sometimes kids can comprehend the impact of $6 a gallon gasoline more than they can $300,000+ for college.

• I tried to figure out what was appealing about the UC schools, and a lot of it was the outdoor lifestyle. We applied to some other colleges accordingly. My daughter never had a “dream
school”, but dream locations are a real thing. There are lots of great places around the U.S. but your kid may need help thinking of someplace they aren’t familiar with.

• Has your daughter taken the ACT or SAT yet? That will give you a lot of information in addition to her GPA.

Wishing you well! It’s a really hard process.

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Sorry to have sort of dropped out of the message thread that I started. It has been a rough month in a number of ways, and I’m just now circling back to this.

Even though I want to be making lists and visiting schools soon (or, at least, at some point during Junior year), it does not seem like the process my daughter wants to follow. I know that the Juniors meet with the guidance counselors in January or February for both building Senior year schedules and discussing post-grad plans, so - maybe that will help my daughter start to get a little more interested & a little more realistic about college prospects.

She has gotten incredibly behind Junior year with her studies, especially this last month (due, in part, to one very time-consuming extracurricular: school drama club/ theater production) and balancing her first 2 AP classes with this extracurricular. We are trying to be understanding yet checking in on missing assignments and upcoming tests, regularly, and being in close to weekly contact with both teachers and her new tutor.
I think she does not want to discuss college visits and college options because I think she wants to see if she can somehow pull it all together by the end of the year and come out the other side with great grades.
I think she’s still focused on NYC-area options but seems to be reconnecting with some friends who are freshman at area universities recently too (Pitt, Duquesne, Chatham), which makes me think that she’s at least entertaining the prospect of staying fairly close-by too.
As Pitt has gotten more selective, I think she is very aware :pensive: that this likely would maybe be a reach school for her at this point - at least, with the way that this academic year is going.

I can foresee building two sorts of lists, but which - I am not sure at this point: further vs. closer schools, business vs. history vs. film, tuition exchange pics vs. in-state public or comparable level of affordability.

I like the idea that at least two different people mentioned about the weekly homework assignment, looking up different facts about different colleges, I think the simpler of those mentioned might be plausible (especially if I just leave it on a clipboard and do not repeat & remind about it a whole lot :laughing:). I can also foresee handing over my list of about 25-30 school possibilities and then have my daughter eliminate 1/2 and add other (affordable) selections of her own choice too.

My husband is sick of my talking about all of this, so I very much appreciate all of you for reading and listening and offering suggestions!
He does think that she needs to keep things simple: choose somewhere close-by, get a better handle on study habits, mental health, independence, all of it, but as I’m the one voicing some of this, I’m the one she yells at when college ideas are discussed :face_with_raised_eyebrow:. It is hard to predict just what she will be ready for 18 months from now - so much maturing and development could happen during senior year.

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Big hug to you. Believe me, been there. The day my kid’s guidance counselor called me (at work, during the day) to tell me “You need to stop talking about college” was a very low day. My husband immediately went into “I told you so” mode (not helpful), and the guidance counselor was polite but firm.

You need to trust the rest of us that college isn’t running away while your D focuses on what’s important to HER- the performance, her friends, trying to keep up with a demanding schedule, her mental health.

No college is going to tell her “We don’t read the application of anyone who didn’t spend junior year obsessed with us”.

No college is going to tell her “We don’t admit students who didn’t make a big excel spreadsheet with the pros and cons listed”.

So… sadly… I’m going to tell you what my kids GC told me-- just let it go for now. When she’s ready, you’ll know. When she wants to talk about the intersection of plausible budget and location-- you’ll know. You guys will have a MUCH more pleasant winter break this year if you’ve had a month to practice NOT talking about college.

Starting… NOW!

Big hugs. I’ve walked in your shoes…

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So true. When she’s ready, you’ll know. When she wants to talk about the intersection of plausible budget and location-- you’ll know. You guys will have a MUCH more pleasant winter break this year if you’ve had a month to practice NOT talking about college.

Just trying to figure out how to navigate Christmas with my parents (retired educators), professor sister & [loves school]-niece…Junior year seems to be very successful and exciting for her and they are loving touring colleges together and such :confounded:. I am very happy :blush: for my niece but excitement for her is best kept fairly subdued at present…

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Honestly, my D23 was never really engaged in the process. She spent a lot of time telling me that she “was just trying to enjoy my high school experience!” In the end I wound up interrogating her enough that I managed to come up with a list for her. We did make a rule that we would only discuss college stuff for 30 min a week her junior year, that did help.

All of that to say, she LOVES college. I think she’s a person who lives in the moment and it is difficult for her to see into the future. While 18 months away seems like next week to us adults, for her it was eons away.

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I think your parents get a paragraph, and your sibling gets a one liner.

Parents- “Gosh, Muriel is going to be so excited to tell you about working on the play, what’s going on with her friends and her classes. We’ve all agreed to put a pin in the college talk for the sake of everyone’s mental health including cousin Sally. So don’t be surprised if I change the subject if it comes up!” delivered in a chipper tone of voice.

To sibling- “we’ve decided NOT to talk about college for the sake of our daughters’ mental health-- we’re all living and breathing it, we’re going to take a much needed break over the holidays. Can you let Sally know? I hope she’ll be as relieved as Muriel is!” delivered in a cautionary yet polite tone.

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This all sounds very familiar. :grinning:

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I think this is a little early to be making college lists. For what it is worth, I did all the college planning for my kids starting in spring of junior year. I planned the visits, made the appointments, booked the flights and hotels. My kiddos went on all the tours and I think we were always on the same page after visiting.
I don’t think either one of them ever went on a college website or did any independent research.

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Neither did my three. It all eorked out well :slight_smile:

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Really? My kids have taken quite different approaches but at no point left all the research up to me. D19 (proactively) did almost all the research on her own, but I think a lot of it was triggered by the older kids in her mock trial team talking about their applications/decisions. I added a couple of colleges into the mix (both of which she hated after visiting lol) but overall, didn’t do much other than arrange logistics of college visits and paid common app fees. C26 wanted to find out more about appropriate colleges after they decided what they wanted to do but didn’t know where to start, so I did a fair amount of initial research (completely different list of schools to D19) but once we had narrowed down a few targets they did a fair amount of their own research on those schools. I guess each student/family finds an approach that works best for them.

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I’m glad your children have been so successful at their college searches to date but I’m not sure your post is helpful to the OP.

No one is suggesting that the OP just choose a school for their child, but some kids (obviously not yours) need help with the process, especially at the beginning.

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And I did help C26 at the beginning, as I said. OP’s kid doesn’t seem to have the issue of not knowing where they want to go but rather of focusing on potentially unrealistic schools (first post). As with my C26, once she gets more excited about it and maybe has a better idea of what she wants, then maybe she will get more engaged with realistic schools.

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Same. I think we often know our kids better than they know themselves. We also know the budget and we know that there are tons of great schools out there beyond the brand names that everyone is talking about. Almost every school I chose for my kids was a yes after the visit. The couple that they chose were a no (from them).

OP-We visited our first school in the very early fall of junior year for my D20. We got in the car afterwards and she started balling. She liked the school but was completely overwhelmed with the idea of college. We decided to table the discussion for awhile. By the time Christmas rolled around, her friends had been doing tours or starting to schedule tours for the spring and she asked if we could start planning some trips. I think you just have to wait for them to be ready. I’ve done 5 tours with my current junior and he said that he thinks thats enough for now. But I can already see his growth in starting to know what he is looking for on the tours. He’s very into vibe and what’s around campus. And has also decided we need to try out the cafeteria at every school (first tour he was embarassed to even go into the caf!). So we’ll start up again in the late winter or spring (whenever he’s ready).

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Agreed that “peers are starting to talk about college” had far more of an impact on getting ours to engage with college planning than “mom and dad have been talking about college, for some time”.

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Thanks everybody. I think the fact that my daughter’s grades and schoolwork are quite poor right now compared to every previous year of school is a big reason why she’s not engaged with any college conversation. I do not think she would ever have dreamed of thinking of herself as… possibly not college material.

Throughout her early years, she was in the Gifted program, and I remember mostly all A’s without too much effort until freshman year; she still managed mostly A’s, but I did have her de-enrolled (not sure if that’s the correct terminology) from the Gift Program - mainly because she was just not able with keeping up at all with regular coursework when they would have meetings or field trips, etc.

Now, junior year, she’s constantly behind. Even when I originally posted my first message about some of this, she was not in the position that she is in today. What were A’s last year are now C’s; what were B’s are now D’s… and I’m just trying to figure out how to build better habits and get her back on track before it’s all just too late.

I mean, it’s never too late, people can always switch paths and go to college at a later point, I just think it would be pretty disappointing for her.

Incidentally, I took Blossom’s advice in a brief text exchange with my sister about college-related conversation over the holidays. And as I suspected, my sister feels that I would be short-changing her daughter [my niece’s] accomplishments if I do not engage her in discussion about her own academic accomplishments and college touring plans, congratulate her for her various accolades, etc. While I do agree, to a certain extent, I just need to plead with them a bit about attempting to steer clear of some of these conversations with my daughter around.

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