College Admissions are Stressful for Students…and for Parents

You’re trying to help. You don’t want to push your kid too hard. You might have high hopes for a top 20 school. You might just feel overwhelmed by the insane competitiveness of state schools these days. You might have younger kids to support, too. And you probably have adult friends whose kids are going through the same process and who are busy bragging away about everything their child is doing.

It’s a lot.

I think a huge part of my job is helping parents navigate this process just as much as students. The students have to do all the work, but the parents have to get through it too.

So, how do you stay sane through this process? Here are a few of my tips!

1. How to Communicate with Other Parents

I could call this tip “don’t compare yourself to others”, but the problem is other parents are going to bring up the topic to you. It will likely be hard to avoid. So, instead I want to use this tip to help you communicate with other parents in a way that feels supportive of your child and maybe just a little bit braggy!

For starters, put together a little elevator pitch of what your student’s application is about. Here are a few things to include:

• Their intended major.

• A specific interest within that major (something like a research paper thesis that just helps you get more specific).

• What your child might do with that major. (This does not need to be set-in-stone. Just some pie-in-the-sky idea of a future career, or two ideas.)

• Your child’s biggest passion / how they want to change the world.

• Your child’s top 2-5 extracurriculars (especially any that are more unique!).

By the way, getting that list together with your child will also help him/her write college essays, prepare for interviews, and generally navigate the college admissions process. So, this can be a great activity to sit down and do together as a family!

Once you have that list, start to craft a little narrative. Something like: “My daughter loves chemistry and has been working on RNA editing. She hopes to get into medical research and use RNA editing to solve genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis. She also really loves poetry, so we’re trying to figure out how to balance her artistic side with her core academic side in these applications.”

Or: “My son has been interested in industrial design for years. He’s specifically researching and designing for differently abled users of products, like people who lose a limb or suffer from arthritis. He wants to work with a company like Braun or OXO to design everyday products and make them more useful to the average consumer and to niche consumers. He’s also played soccer his whole life, so we want to include that positively in his application as well.”

Notice that in both of those examples, I included something unrelated to the main major and passion. Many parents come to me asking how they’re supposed to make all of their child’s diverse interests sound good in one elevator pitch. But, the assumption there is that everything must somehow clearly relate. That’s not true. Your child is absolutely allowed to love science AND poetry, and the two don’t have to intersect at all. They can. She could write poetry about science. I’ve seen it done. But, you do not need to find explicit connections across all activities.

And then, if your child has done some particularly impressive research, activity, project, etc. feel free to add that in! It can feel good to brag a little.

2. How to Provide Useful Help to Your Child

A lot of students just don’t want help from their parents. If that’s the case, what do you do?

Honestly, I think this process needs to be undertaken primarily by the student. When parents start writing the essays for their kids…it almost always backfires. There are so many dead giveaways that parents put into their own essay drafts that make it painfully obvious the essay wasn’t written by the student. Not to mention that if the interview comes, your child’s real voice won’t sound anything at all like their essays. It just doesn’t work for so many reasons.

So, I don’t think it’s useful to write the essays for your child (and many parents don’t want to / don’t have the time, anyways). But, there are a lot of things you can do instead!

Get your child help.

This is a really challenging process. Many students will benefit from outside help, if that’s something that fits into your budget. Ideally, look for a college strategist who emphasizes the family and encourages students to work with their parents in various ways.

Help with brainstorming.

Brainstorming is really, really tough to do alone. It’s one of the biggest areas my students struggle, and I’m constantly encouraging my students to grab parents, aunts & uncles, cousins, etc. to help with the brainstorming phase.

Review essays once they’re about 80-90% complete.

Look for anything that feels unclear. Students often write about things they’ve been thinking about for months or years. What sounds totally clear to a student might not be communicating clearly to an uninformed reader.

Also, look for the character traits the essay demonstrates. Do you feel that your child’s best traits are being shown? If not, make some recommendations about great traits that you’d love to see in an essay and specific anecdotes that could help to demonstrate those traits. This is a great area for parents to contribute.

Help your child create a schedule.

It’s hard to juggle school tests and assignments, SATs or ACTs, college essays, and extracurriculars. Help your child come up with a workable schedule and stick to it. This might mean encouraging your child to drop an activity or two for a few months to give them more time. This is a completely acceptable thing to do. It very likely won’t hurt your application in any way, but if you’re worried about it, just send me a quick email.

This might also mean carving out time for your child to be home alone or go to a library to work. Ensuring there are times with zero distractions to really dig into the work required. For top 20 schools, this is a massive endeavor. Get clear on that reality shift early on. Most students who get into top 20 schools start writing their essays in the middle of Junior year, and continue writing their essays for a full 10-12 months. It’s not a short, simple, or quick process. There are so many rounds of editing to make an essay really Ivy-level. And the number of schools that are creeping up into that sub-15% acceptance rate is…increasing every year. College admissions are becoming more, not less competitive. So, dedicate the time required, and help set your child’s expectations, too!

3. How do I stay positive?

This question is usually combined with the question: What are my child’s real chances of getting into XX school?

This is a tough one. Realistically, I don’t even have to know you to know that your child’s chances of getting into the Ivy League are almost zero. Sure, some of them have acceptance rates around 7%. But, in reality, every Ivy League school is a lottery at this point. I’ve seen so many absolutely incredible applications get rejected from not one but EVERY Ivy League school. I see stories every year in the news and on media of students who run six- or SEVEN-figure businesses who get rejected from the Ivy League.

No matter what your child has done, I can almost guarantee you that some kid out there has done more…and gotten rejected. So, every Ivy League (and every sub-10% acceptance rate school) is a lottery school to me.

Right, this section was supposed to be about positivity…and that felt pretty negative. What gives?

Positivity comes, in part, from realism. Know that the college landscape has massively changed, and your child will likely need more support than any cohort in history. Help your child do everything possible to get into top-20 schools, competitive state schools, and high quality private schools. And remember that someone has to get in. They don’t let in a lot of kids, but they do let in some. Your child could be one.

After that, spend some time really looking into target schools. As a baseline, look at the averages for GPA and SAT/ACT scores for that college. If your child’s numbers are on the high end of that school, and the school is between about 20-35% acceptance rate, then you can consider that a target school. Even if your child is at the top of the numbers for Harvard, for example, you shouldn’t consider that a target school. But, if you’re towards the top of the stats for Villanova or Brandeis, you could consider that a target.

A great place to check your child’s numbers against each school’s average is Niche.com. Their admissions calculator offers a pretty simple interface, and it’s completely free. You do not need to create an account in order to use it, which is good because their account creation process requires too much information, in my opinion. Another great option is CollegeRaptor. You do have to create an account for this one and put in a lot of information. But then you can add colleges you like and see all their acceptance rates and your chances (based on your numbers alone) in one place.

This is the biggest place where positivity comes from. If you can help your child find really great target schools that match his/her interests and that seem like genuinely great places to be…you and your child will feel more positive. You can’t really feel positive about a Harvard or UPenn application. You can feel hopeful! But, positivity is tough. You absolutely can feel positive about amazing target schools that your child could really thrive at.

If you’re having trouble in your college search, get some help! That’s an easy way someone can help your family achieve some peace in this process.

4. Find Someone Who Can Handle Important Dates For You

One of the biggest stressors of this process is that there’s just so much you don’t know. You find out two weeks too late that your child could have qualified for this awesome summer program. You find out a month too late that you should have applied for this great scholarship. You find out a year too late that your chances for this particular school or program are much stronger if you just add XX to your resume in Sophomore year. That feeling is probably the feeling that haunts parents the most.

This is the purpose of a College Strategist. I also put together a broad strokes picture of deadlines here. And that page links to several other more specific pages with deadlines for summer programs, scholarships, and more. Start looking those things over as early as you possibly can.