November 29, 2010

Thanksgiving can be a nice break for students and a time to relax with extended family. It can also be stressful for seniors as they may have already applied to schools and are waiting to hear, or have not yet applied and have that hanging over them. As some kids are starting to hear that they are accepted (or not) to their dream school, it raises the stress level for everyone.  Keep that in mind and try to set up times to talk about college and not have it come up in every conversation.

If your child is having trouble getting the job done as far as finishing the search for schools that are a good fit and applying, it would be good to encourage then to set up a meeting with their guidance counselor. It is often more effective to have someone other than a parent impress upon our students that the deadlines are real and that it is important to make this a priority now. They may need some help breaking the process into manageable tasks.

If a student is really not interested, it is possible that taking a year off to do something else productive may be the best thing. It is still recommended that a student apply to schools now and then defer attending for a year.

Most importantly, and this applies to juniors and seniors, our kids need to keep up their grades and extracurricular activities.  Schools will often wait until the last minute to see what students accomplish in their senior year.  There are many qualified applicants and if a student checks out senior year, that can affect a school’s decision – both as far as acceptance and the awarding of merit aid. The juniors at least know that they need to work hard – grades and the rigor of classes taken are still at the top of the college’s list.