Timing is everything: When to start looking at universities

Question: When is the right time to initially start looking on colleges?

Question: When is the right time to initially start looking on colleges?

Answer: Had you asked me this two months ago, I would have suggested that you wait until the end of sophomore year when your student would have had more time to develop their interests, along with having a better sense of their academic record. But my opinions changed dramatically when I went on the college tour this year with my own daughter, who is a freshman in high school. Like many other families, I was visiting colleges in the Boston and New York City area over spring break as an opportunity to update myself on many of the top schools there as part of my consulting practice. Since my daughter had the same week off, she reluctantly joined me for all the college visits knowing she would have the evenings and weekends free to see the cities themselves. To her surprise, she ended up getting far more out of the visits now than had she waited for a few years.

While college looms large for all our students, it is still somewhat of an amorphous entity when you are 15. We, as parents. remind our teens of the importance of good grades and strong extracurricular activities, but it takes on new meaning when those same admonishments are made by an admission officer. Not only was my daughter learning about the students schools choose in terms of academic accomplishments, she was consistently hearing the message to follow her passions and find a way to emphasize what would make her unique and valuable to the student body. She also heard about studying French with other Tufts students in a convent near Geneva, and the opportunity to bicycle through the streets of NYC in the middle of the night with 50 other students and a Columbia professor. While she decided that she might not appreciate the humor of the typical MIT student (they throw a piano out of their dorm every year) she certainly liked the idea of paid research opportunities as an undergraduate). While she loved the natural beauty of the Wellesley campus, she also spent hours regaling me why she would not be one to benefit from an all-girl environment. While I was in awe of the Charles River and red brick architecture of Harvard Yard, my daughter was already picturing how fun it would be to ride a trolley down Commonwealth Avenue and live in a college community where the mean age appears to be 20, with throngs of students commuting from Boston College and Boston University.

A 15-year-old has a much better memory than a 50-year-old — she could recite each college admission talk almost verbatim when we returned to our hotel to debrief about each college. It was also a great opportunity for her to share aspects that she thought would or would not fit her personality or interests. There was none of the anxiety junior students face when they visit colleges knowing that they will have to narrow down their choices and come up with a list. A younger student still believes that they have innumerable options ahead and approaches college visits with the same open-mindedness as a kid in a candy store.

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What did our time together accomplish? It will be remembered as a coveted opportunity to spend more hours than we usually have in our busy schedules to allow her to wrestle with what she values and where she sees herself five years from now. It added to my credibility to have someone else reiterate the competitive nature of college admissions and the need to take as many challenging courses as possible to prepare yourself for a post secondary education. But the one immeasurable benefit that will probably be the most valuable is that renewed fire in her belly that all my nagging could not have produced. It’s enough to make me think this college visiting stuff might just be the thing when sophomore slump comes around.

Joan Franklin is the owner of The College Source, an Independent College Consulting Practice.(www.thecollegesource.org) She is also a certified school counselor in the Issaquah School District. She lives and practices on Mercer Island and can be reached at 232-5626.