Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Admitted in July 2017. It’s being republished as part of NACAC’s Best of the Blog series
Like many college counselors, the only T-shirts I own are college T-shirts. Last week, I wore lots of them during a beach vacation. Since the only time I usually wear them is at the gym at 5 a.m., I don’t usually get many reactions. However, at the beach, people would respond to the college on the shirt, and it became challenging to know how to respond:
Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Admitted in August 2017. It’s being republished as part of NACAC’s Best of the Blog series.
All of you see it every year.
A senior who graduated in May stops in before they head off to college. The smile is bright, but the eyes betray them; they are scared.
It’s easy for me to reassure them because, as old as I am, I remember how transformational the first week of college was. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I grew up in a town of 13,000 in Illinois. I really had no idea what to expect. I was pretty scared.
It started in my second class. My professor said something, and I laughed out loud. He asked me what was so funny, and I told him that I had never ever thought about what he had just mentioned. He gave me a sly grin and became a lifelong mentor.
My youngest children—twins my wife and I adopted in Kenya during our 14 years there—are just beginning the college search process.
They are now 16, and my daughter and I went on a college tour last week. We visited two large public schools and two small private schools. We got up at 3 a.m. to make a flight, and our first school was a very large public university. It was a great tour, and our rep had gone beyond expectations to make it personal for my daughter. But then, something extraordinary happened.
Editor’s note: This column was first shared on the NACAC Exchange.
It’s just BUSY this time of the year, and while what I WANT to do is close the door and write, write, write, there are a myriad of other things that have to do done. There is nothing that says fall like the word busy.
So when a student popped in my office and asked if she could work on her application, I told her sure and kept working on what I needed to do. She would ask the occasional question, but mostly we were both working on her separate to-do lists.
Then there was silence. As a father of five, I FEAR silence. I looked up, and she was crying.
Editor’s note: This column was first shared on the NACAC Exchange.
Like many college counselors, the only T-shirts I own are college T-shirts. Last week, I wore lots of them during a beach vacation. Since the only time I usually wear them is at the gym at 5 a.m., I don’t usually get many reactions. However, at the beach, people would respond to the college on the shirt, and it became challenging to know how to respond:
Person at Beach: I WENT TO TEXAS A&M!
Me: That’s nice.
PAB: DON’T YOU JUST LOVE IT? (At the beach, people scream when they see their college on a T-shirt.)
Me: I think it is one of the greatest large universities in the US.
PAB: WAIT. DIDN’T YOU GO THERE?