Just got back from a combo. of college tour and family vacation - a wonderful trip to Washington DC, Baltimore (Maryland Institute of the Arts) and Providence (Rhode Island School of Design.
A short advice list for parents of junior and seniors:
Resist the lure of telling your kid what is the best choice.
Why? We don't really know what is right for another person. Yes, we may think we do, but we don't. Now is the time to give up control, if you haven't already.
After all, this decision affects so much of a teen's upcoming years. Do you want to risk your child saying to themselves in the first semester of their college year, "If only I had followed my own intuitions instead of listening to mom (or dad)?
Trips to see colleges are worth the expense and time.
There's so much that college promotional material doesn't tell you. And if you have a child, like one of mine, who doesn't want to analyze, the experience of seeing how students dress, how profs or admission advisers communicate or the looks of the college campus can authoritatively rule out some campuses.
One friend's 17 year old on a college look-see trip with her mother took one look at how the students at a given campus dressed (preppy) and knew immediately it wasn't the place for her.
For my younger daughter, "Amy", it was clues like the students' artwork ("not very good here") or the fact that the campus was interspersed with non-educational buildings. During the RISD tour, Amy said, "Look at that 'green'! Not much place for students to gather." Yep, limits the twenty by thirty feet triangle
of lawn certainly gave the impression that students didn't mingle much, spent most of their time in their rooms or working on their individual art projects. Our tour guide - an unusually frank, unbiased guide - confirmed that. "No anti-war rallies here when students at other campus were protesting."
But, on the other hand, the biggest predictor of whether a student goes to a given college, is the weather on the day they visit! Which brings me to my last piece of advice for now.
Prayer is a comfort; prayer is essential
Sure, I have no control over how my daughter views things, her emotional reactions to things like a crazed woman moaning on the streets of Chicago when we went to see that city's institute of art.No control over whether it's 70 degrees or 40 with a chilling wind, gloriously sunny or dismally cloudy when we visit a campus outside California in March.
But I do know someone who told stormy waters to calm down and stop their flooding of his trainee's boat. I can ask him to guide the factors that influence how my daughter reacts to a college campus, including weather.
One more, for Christians in particular, or any religious affiliation
Make sure there is a good Christian group on campus, or at least easy access to a church that cares about college students.
Art schools don't usually have Christians groups on campus, I believe. But our tour guide at the Chicago Inst. of Art, not only was a Christian but attended church and met regularly with a couple of other Christians at his art school under the guidance of an IVCF staffer (the same organization that helped me greatly in college). Is that serendipitous?
MICA, the Baltimore art school, had a long list of clubs, including a Christian one. And I wrote an e-mail to the IVCF staffer (available on the web) who works at a campus very near by, Johns Hopkins. She told me she has one MICA student coming to the J. Hopkin's IVCF meeting and who would be glad to welcome Sheri in. That's good. That helps to know there would be support so that she could hold fast to her faith, as she longs to do.
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