My Kid's a High School Senior!

There is drama in the house; the Senior's schedule isn't what he's planned last Spring. He's 18 now, so he made an executive decision last week:  he wasn't going to school. He needed a mental health day. He needed to come to terms with the fall term.  See, he did a lot of add/drop of classes -the THIRD week of school. I'm not sure that his schedule was so bad to make this new problem necessary, but this is his rodeo, not mine. So his day off was supposedly catching up in Chem 2 and Spanish 3 (moved into those from Environmental Science and Spanish 2) and making effort on the Precal that he just isn't "getting." He has to get over this hump- he is depending on scholarships for college, so he must be able to maintain the GPA under any pressures so as not to lose the scholarships.

Every day he gets a stack of mail from colleges.  He even got a Birthday card from one. He's evaluating his choices, already making early applications, and has been writing essays and finding and applying for scholarships since June.

I'd like to think he'll actually read this message from a homeschooler off to her Freshman year at Richmond:

• Go With Your Gut: When writing an admissions essay, many people fall into the trap of telling a college what they think it wants to hear. Essays about ending world hunger and discovering the always elusive solution to all the world’s problems are run of the mill (note use of cliché). Therefore, when one college prompted me to write about “What outrages you” I chose the first thing that came to mind: my least favorite book series, Twilight, and the detrimental effect it has on tween girls. However, I doubted my choice and began an essay on assisting underprivileged children in Indonesia. After severe writer’s block, I returned to my original essay and was accepted by that college! 
• Learn to Laugh at Yourself: By the end of my senior year, I had applied to twelve colleges. That’s right, twelve. This meant that I had written around fifteen different essays and had saved several drafts of each essay in the same folder. By the time I was finishing up my application to college number twelve, all the essays looked the same. As a result, I accidentally submitted the same essay twice. Two completely different prompts, but only one essay… After I realized my error, my mom and I laughed for about a day afterwards because we couldn’t believe we had made such a silly mistake. But the truth is, mistakes happen. Thankfully I was able to get in touch with the admissions department and straighten out the essay confusion. That situation could have been extremely stressful and discouraging, but with a sense of humor, I was able to smooth it out fairly painlessly.
• Take a Break: Twelve applications was a lot of work and got old pretty quickly. To keep myself from going completely insane, I decided to fill out a very different application. Survivor. One of my all time favorite TV shows. I have been watching this show since the first season and amid all of the college applications, I had an epiphany: I’m finally old enough to apply! In between college essays, I grabbed my little sister and we filmed the most ridiculous application video I think Survivor has ever seen because it didn’t get me on the show. But it definitely provided some much needed stress relief for me and for my family as they enjoyed laughing at my “wilderness skills.” 
• Keep An Open Mind: You may think you know exactly where you are going to college next year, and honestly, you may not have it right. I didn’t know anything about Richmond until December of last year. My mom suggested it and my first thought was “What is interesting about Virginia?” However, I did my research online and fell in love with the school and all of the programs it had to offer. It only took a few weeks before Richmond went from number twelve to number one on my list. 
• Evaluate the Pros and Cons: I know this looks like a boring final point, but a pro/con list was probably one of the most helpful things I did during my college application process. This was a skill I learned after watching numerous reruns of Gilmore Girls. After every college visit, I wrote out a detailed pro/con list including every single boring or shallow detail about the school, from the quality of the programs to how the students dressed. Then in late April (a bit too close to that big May 1st deadline) I sat down with all of my lists and just stared at them. Thankfully, I had my little sister to make sense of it all for me. She subtracted the cons from the pros to give each school a score. Richmond scored a twenty-two, while no other school broke ten; one even had a grand total of negative four. After she was done, she looked at me and said “You’re going to be a Spider!” 

My friend Susan posted Tips For Parents of High School Seniors to address other Senior issues. Here are some extras from me:

• Hie thee to College Confidential.  Actually if you are competitively serious about college, start here earlier, like at least 8th grade.
• Use every resource you have available- http://www.hippocampus.org/ and http://www.khanacademy.org/ and all the resources provided by textbook publishers can fill in where an overworked, busy, inexperienced or just plain bad teacher fails.  I've always told my kids, "If you didn't learn anything today, it's your own fault" and "Every day is a school day."
• Submit something to the Art & Writing competition. Who knows where it could take you?