Making TEA
Discovering Simply the Best Colleges with Your Teen!,
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Step 2: Research
It’s September, your teen is back in school and life begins to take on a familiar rhythm: assignments, sports, clubs, community/volunteer work, and friends are rounding out the new year’s schedule. As a parent of a junior, you know that there are a few more tasks to be added to your teen’s weekly calendar. Making time for in-depth conversations and getting clear about wishes, hopes, dreams, goals, interests, finances, and, preparing for and scheduling standardized testing are foundational to the college search and is really a part of Goalsetting/Step 1.
In Step 2, research is the primary task, though it’s also time to set up a system for organizing the wealth of material about the college search that is arriving in the mailbox, in your teen’s email, and from the guidance staff at school.
Your teen is about to dive into this phase (though you want to have a sense of what they’re doing, right?):
• Naming the parts of the search process and highlighting those that need more in-depth study and information
• Referring to the ideas generated about goals, needs, and interests, to inform choices about which colleges and universities make the first list of colleges to research (that span the spectrum of likelies, possibles and reachers), and
• Thinking through personal preferences to discover the best matches between self and characteristics of different campuses, departments and/or programs within colleges, sizes of campus, and location... the kinds of information learned throughout this research phase.
Do you remember this part of the process from your high school days? What are your memories? It’s really the same type of ENORMOUS task you faced as an adult when starting your first job when you had no experience in the work force, purchasing a new home, moving to an area that was completely unfamiliar to you, or even becoming a parent. It’s BIG and it has real life consequences!
For most teens it is a HUGE, overwhelming, almost paralyzing process. It can be exciting and transformational.
Major in You
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Friend Jill
Tweet with Jill
It’s September, your teen is back in school and life begins to take on a familiar rhythm: assignments, sports, clubs, community/volunteer work, and friends are rounding out the new year’s schedule. As a parent of a junior, you know that there are a few more tasks to be added to your teen’s weekly calendar. Making time for in-depth conversations and getting clear about wishes, hopes, dreams, goals, interests, finances, and, preparing for and scheduling standardized testing are foundational to the college search and is really a part of Goalsetting/Step 1.
In Step 2, research is the primary task, though it’s also time to set up a system for organizing the wealth of material about the college search that is arriving in the mailbox, in your teen’s email, and from the guidance staff at school.
Your teen is about to dive into this phase (though you want to have a sense of what they’re doing, right?):
• Naming the parts of the search process and highlighting those that need more in-depth study and information
• Referring to the ideas generated about goals, needs, and interests, to inform choices about which colleges and universities make the first list of colleges to research (that span the spectrum of likelies, possibles and reachers), and
• Thinking through personal preferences to discover the best matches between self and characteristics of different campuses, departments and/or programs within colleges, sizes of campus, and location... the kinds of information learned throughout this research phase.
Do you remember this part of the process from your high school days? What are your memories? It’s really the same type of ENORMOUS task you faced as an adult when starting your first job when you had no experience in the work force, purchasing a new home, moving to an area that was completely unfamiliar to you, or even becoming a parent. It’s BIG and it has real life consequences!
For most teens it is a HUGE, overwhelming, almost paralyzing process. It can be exciting and transformational.
Major in You
blog her
Friend Jill
Tweet with Jill
