I sit here on a Delta flight from New York to San Francisco returning from school tours and auditions and reflecting back on the last five months. My son is a senior in high school and is hopefully off to college somewhere out of town but not too far away. He plays jazz guitar and applied to nine schools all together. It is a long and arduous process that started during the previous summer.
The work starts with a lot of thinking then a lot of website searching and then a lot of talking and thinking and calling old associates that may still live in such and such a town or teach at such and such school. The whole family did a tour of a few schools in Southern California during the summer that coincided with a conference in San Diego. One last car trip with the family. A good experience for the younger sibling to see a few universities and perhaps get exposed to the concept of higher education.
I would not consider my wife and I helicopter parents. Very involved when our kids were younger but as they grew older we have stepped back a bit. No more PTA. Bake sales are often forgotten. Kids soccer is fun but the comradely and party verve of the parents seems to also keep the team playing every year. But when the college application process came around we got back involved. The school had resources but overall it seemed that the responsibility was on a 17 year old’s shoulders. We stepped in. I quit my job and took on freelance work to get my head around the whole thing. Drastic measures perhaps but I have done such things before. In the end I am glad I did.
Our son has been a really good student. He has taken AP classes and been involved with a lot of clubs. He has a part-time job, which he had to really work to get. In the last year he has had a nasty case of senioritis. He become a lot more social and has often stretched the limits of both parents – staying out pretty late (I will not divulge until what hour) and being a kid getting to know the world. So along with the uncertainty of college a lot of growing up has been going on. This is good.
It was recommended that he apply to nine schools. Why nine schools? I have no idea. We took the advice and made the list.
19 Tips for Helping Your Kid Apply to College
1. Open a communal gmail account that is his name at gmail.com and use this for all application correspondence. Make sure everyone in the family knows the password.
2. Have him create separate google documents for all the essays he is going to have to write. He should copy and paste the questions into each of these documents just to get the cogs turning. What a bummer to write essays on lots of different computers and ones that may not be backed up. Having things centralized helps versioning.
3. Use google calendar and put in all the dates (e.g when applications are due. When the school visit is. Auditions. Possible interviews)
4. Get really anal and get a three ring binder and print out the relevant info for each school in separated tabs. Copy and paste key info about the school into documents and print the suckers out.
5. Memorize your kid’s social security number.
6. Print out SAT scores and put them in the binder
7. Create a document with all the possible people who will write letters of recommendations. Make sure you have their current email address. Have your kid email them asking if it is cool if they can write letters on his behalf. Most applications have you submit these people’s names and emails as part of the application so it is good to be ready.
8. Make a spreadsheet of all the schools and key stuff. Print it out and stare at it with a large coffee until you can recite the dates like the star spangled banner. Have columns for website urls, website applications and application name and any other stuff that seems useful.
9. Calm your significant other down when they ask a nerve-racking question at 11 pm about some minute detail. Let them know that in the morning they can go to the google docs and look up the detail on their own.
10. If your kid is in the performing arts, get all the audition clothes way ahead of time.
11. Most applications have the ability to start them and complete them gradually. Start them early. If you cannot find the application on the website and you created an account and you just still see the usual ethnically diverse set of attractive college kids when you log in, call the place. The link may be plain text that is not underlined and in light grey. No kidding!
12. Get ready for the FAFSA in December. You have to do your taxes anyway and unless you have some magic bank account to pay for everything, financial aid will be in the picture.
13. If your kid has the capacity to write essays about how they want to find a cure for cancer, build biodegradable, solar housing in Somalia that is also edible or cure political corruption get them writing scholarship essays early. Most 17 year olds just want to be 17 year olds, do their thing and maybe have fun and play on facebook but yours may be different. Milk it for all it is worth.
14. When you fly for auditions or interviews book with Virgin America. The seats are bigger and the cool purple lights trick you into thinking you are on vacation.
15. When you’re visiting schools, get to know the other parents. Even though my son was competing for the same spot as some of the other kids, all the parents I ran into were people I would invite to my house for dinner. The sense of openness, good intentions and well wishing was extraordinary.
16. Try not to scream at your computer at how lousy the online application websites are. Stuff like this gets old very quickly and the oversight committee from three years ago thought that having every form submission create a new popup window with useless information was so cool.
17. When the form you just submitted seems like it is stuck. Walk away. Make a cup of tea and forget about it. In ten minutes, when you come back to your computer, you might get a really cool server error message with some useless information about timeouts and database offline jargon.
18. If your kid is in the performing arts, apply to five schools at most not nine. Trust me.
19. Hang in there. In six months you may be able to turn their bedroom into a really cool spare office.