Would love some advice

cangel
Sat, 20 Jan 2007 06:03:42 +0000

Momnew, your D sounds like a wonderful girl and a good student. You are living in College Admissions Anxiety Central being just outside NYC. HAve some long talks with your D about opting out of the rat race altogether. What I mean by that is to look to schools that play up to the strengths in her application rather than applying to all the usual suspects that her friends are applying to and that her friends parents are insisting that they apply to. Now is the time to circumvent that thinking before she falls in love with only overly competitive schools or the bragging starts.

Frankly, her freshman grades will hurt her at schools where adcoms are scratching for anything to separate applicants, especially coupled with geography, because at some point she will be compared with her peers in the NYC area. So why apply to more than one of those schools, when there are so many other great places.

Tufts and Maryland are a great start at this pattern of thinking - are there other state schools that she likes? What about other areas of the country? What does she like about these 2 schools and what are other similar choices? Get her involved in the finances side, too. If you make the search into a hunt for merit money, then that puts a whole different focus on the list. A year or so ago there was a parent who posted about going that route with his son. He basically made a deal with son that money would go into a graduate school fund if merit money was found for college. The self-starting son took that challenge and turned it into a sort of beat the market game (must work better with boys, my D wouldn’t do it). He didn’t end up with a full ride, but he did end up with a solid scholarship at an excellent school and a nest egg for grad school. Obviously this approach works best with focused kids and kids that have fairly solid career plans.

Having said all this, what if she loves Harvard? Well she should apply. She just shouldn’t apply only to highly competitive schools - and one safety. Set yourself up to be a winner in this process by listening to what is important to you and important for you. Very necessary to be sure of your goals and desires in a school, to hold on to when all that external pressure about “I’m going to Ivy X” and “My darling Murgatroyd has been accepted to SNooty school Y”. Just say NO!