College Application Anxiety
Helping your young adult child apply to college is an exercise in parenting, futility, and undying love, but also a time to reconcile your child’s fears and dreams. My daughter, off at boarding school, seemed initially confident about the college application process. She had a college counselor and advisor, as well as several wonderful faculty on board to support her goals. She had her list of deadlines and supplemental essays required for each school. She felt organized and ready to start her senior fall. Yet, sports, AP classes, social dynamics, and “senior girl-itis” quickly kicked in.
Thankfully, the November 1 deadline for Early Decision 1 applications has passed. Yet the process continues to evolve in an ever stressful way. Consider some of the reasons why:
1. Decision fatigue is real. Although academics are the central focus of the college search, there are so many other elements of the experience to consider. The location, size, clubs and Greek life, sports offerings, and distance from home are just a few of the many factors at play. It can be incredibly overwhelming, especially while simultaneously managing high school classes.
2. How to describe oneself? It is very hard for anyone, let alone a young adult, to define their strengths and weaknesses, and to ponder the line between self-promotion and self-deprecation. It is difficult at times to navigate describing accomplishments with dignity while also being insightful into shortcomings without sounding pathetic. We are very rarely taught this in the classroom, and very often struggle with it in daily life. What is meaningful and what are life's goals? Having to write about it requires a great deal of self-scrutiny combined with gentle self caring. Many adults still have difficulty doing this with finesse.
3. Executive function and organizational skills: Many young people, busy with classes, after school activities and complex social dynamics (especially social media driven drama) are overwhelmed by the organization required to manage the many aspects of college applications; personal statements are the hardest, but still there are the supplements, the teacher recommendations, transcripts, tests scores, and biographical information about their parents' education that they may not even know.
4. Finances: My daughter has already apologized when she saw the cost of this disturbingly expensive pursuit of "higher education," and has no real understanding of what the impact will be on her family finances. Will it impact other siblings? Is it selfish to want to go to private college? Can she earn a merit scholarship? And fundamentally: does she believe she really needs to go to college if she doesn’t know what she wants to do in life ahead?
5. The unbelievable reality check: What they really cannot understand is that the outcome of their college application process is not the be all and end all of life's success or happiness. It is hard to instill trust in these young people that the outcome of where they go to college is only the very start of their adult life; it does not guarantee job success or failure, happiness in a family or divorce, fulfillment or boredom.
Please: be patient with their anxiety and try not to make it yours. Remind your kids that it is not a be all and end all moment. It is the next step in a journey that has many, many options for input, good or bad, that they will eventually learn to feel mastery over.
