School is out. It’s summer…a time for relaxing and dreaming, playing and making extra money to play and dream some more. For many high school students who just became seniors, it is the last summer to enjoy their friends and relish in memories, and they should. But for their parents, it also precludes a year of planning and working on life after high school.
There are a lot of assumptions about college that students and parents alike will be dealing with over the next nine months…the time when colleges send out letters that make or break the senior year spring semester. During the past year, I have written a book, “How to Say It to Get Into the College of Your Choice” and learned more than ever, the importance of planning, dreaming, planning and dreaming some more. For, in my efforts, I found that when a student has a goal, a dream or a vision for himself, the sky really is the limit. Colleges and universities can come through with just the right strategy. The next story is an example.
“When I met Sean in his junior year as his high school counselor, he immediately impressed me with his drive to become a veterinarian: ‘Dr. Metcalf, tell me who your dog’s vet is. I want to interview him for my English paper. Did I tell you that I want to be a vet? I plan on going to Texas A&M, the best vet school in the country. I work for a vet, Dr. Smith, after school until about 9:00 each night. Do you think he will give me a good recommendation? Who else should I ask? Do you know anything about scholarships for kids like me?’
Yes, there are lots of scholarships for a straight A student who had worked for the veterinarian, Dr. Smith, for two years, who was involved in the Future Farmers of America since he was able to join as a freshman, and had taken every AP science and math class available. With a fee waiver for his SAT, he made a combined score of 1430. He was poor, but only financially. He was rich in intelligence and drive. He came from a family where his father, a farmer, barely made ends meet and his mother, a school secretary, sold tickets at the football games for extra cash. Yes, I knew of scholarships for kids like him. He just had to compose an essay that exposed the kid he was.
He did. He wrote the essay about growing up poor and helping his father out on the farm early in the morning before going to school. He wrote about how he fell in love with animals as a very young boy when he saw the birth of a calf and how he loved taking care of all the animals on the farm all of his life. He wrote about feeling like an outcast when his clothes weren’t designer brands when he got to high school and then he wrote about how he came to realize that the clothes didn’t matter. It was the man inside the person who mattered. A man he admired became the subject of his essay, too, and that was his father. His father’s father had come from Germany and began a life here with his grandmother. He struggled but had four sons that he always encouraged to do their best. In his eyes they did. In Sean’s eyes, his father did the same, always encouraging him to study so he could become the veterinarian that he wanted to be. His father, Sean said in his essay, taught him about strength, resiliency, God, values and family ties. He took all of those values with him to Texas A & M University. Today he attends the Texas A & M School of Veterinary Medicine.”
-How to Say It To Get Into the College of Your Choice, 2007, Prentice-Hall Publishers.
From a distance, some would have thought Sean had little chance of paying for a college education. Through my interviews with a variety of public, private, community and specialized schools of higher education, I learned that it merely takes a will to succeed to get into a college that can eventually fulfill a student’s dreams. For some, community colleges are a terrific avenue to choose if a student had a bit too much fun in high school and forgot to study. The community college gives the student a chance to beef up a GPA and then transfer to a four year college. For others, a public university may seem like a bargain but a private university can almost match the same price as a public university with scholarships and grants based on the student’s family income, culture, ethnicity, major pursued, legacy, GPA and more. It’s worth the application! As for applications, there should be at least 6.
As the fall approaches, begin looking out for letters in the mailbox describing a variety of offerings by schools. They will be pursuing your son or daughter because colleges are very interested in a student that has made it to her senior year. Of course, they are more interested if her GPA is high and, she has done community service activities, had a job during high school, been in extracurricular activities, has some very good recommendations from teachers, employers, and others. In fact, today’s colleges and universities are more interested in a student with these “diversities”
So, among the summer daze, think of college days. It will after all, guarantee a future for your son or daughter and, it is simply an application away.