THE BRIDGE TO COLLEGE
Ten Tips For Choosing Amongst Your College Offers
By Robert A.G. LeVine
By the end of March, high school seniors and their families will be faced with college offers, rejections, delays and their own decisions about where to begin the next phase of education. It’s an emotional time.
Allow me to provide 10 tips about choosing the right school for you.
First, please do not hurry your college selection. The admissions process has been long and arduous. Identifying schools that might fit your needs … writing and re-writing essays … waiting for the universities to issue their decisions … you have been through a lot! They have given you time to make your choice, so don’t rush things. Avoid the urge to make an important life decision within seconds; you have more than a month to decide. Give yourself the time, space and luxury to make your best decision. You deserve it!
Second, do not just grab for the highest-ranked college or the one that others believe to be most reputable, and do not quickly reject “lesser” schools. Too often, students realize too late that they made mistakes by grabbing for the supposedly obvious choice. What matters is your success, not what others think of your resume. Please reconsider all of your college options in terms of the four “fit” factors: institutional structure; curricular design; on-campus culture; and off-campus opportunities. Learning is about you, not the school or the class or the professor.
Third, redo your research. Everything looks different after you receive an admissions offer! Visit the school. Attend events the colleges host for you (but recognize that these are intended to help the school collect students). Speak with students and alumni. Call the admissions office and ask important questions.
Fourth, look at all phases of college and don’t overemphasize any phase. During the first year or more, you will feel lost transitioning into new environments. During the next few years, growth will happen both on-campus and off-campus. During your final semester, you will start transitioning towards your next phase of life. When choosing your college, recognize how it may or may not optimize each of your several experiences.
Fifth, avoid making lists of pros and cons. Because you decide what areas to evaluate and also how you evaluate each option, what you think might be “objective” decision-making is just self-fulfilling prophecy. Trust your intuition.
Sixth, try not to be overly influenced by other people, including parents. Hear what they have to say but make your own best decision. If mom or dad (or anyone else) is pushing you to agree with their decision, ask for an honest, open-minded conversation.
Seventh, remember that you made a good list of colleges, so you cannot make a bad decision. When choosing amongst great options, don’t worry about making a mistake! And remember, if you change your mind later, you can always pursue a transfer to another school.
Eighth, if a college has placed you on its waiting list, make your decision without thinking about that as-yet-unavailable option. Pick your new school from existing offers. Frankly, the waitlist can feel cruel. While your friends happily wear t-shirts of their chosen colleges, you’re still stuck in the admissions cycle, hoping and praying for something that may never come. In too many cases, colleges don’t even announce that they have closed their admissions. Make your decision without regard to any waitlist. If you do receive an offer, you can revisit your choice (all you lose is the deposit).
Ninth, remember that you do not have to start college right away. Deferring enrollment and taking a gap year (or two) can be incredibly beneficial. Maturing and gaining context by experiencing more of life will help you learn more in your classes (and beyond). Usually, delaying your future leads to a better start, not falling behind. You will have a long career, so please get started better, not faster.
Finally, whatever your options and whatever your choice, always conduct yourself with grace, especially towards other students who may not be blessed with your opportunities. Remember, college admissions are not about winning and losing; it’s merely a decision process for selecting the next place to study. How well you learn at the next level will depend upon you, not your school. Each person should find their best environment, but once you get there, lifetime success is not guaranteed. Don’t just look for opportunities … create opportunities!Robert LeVine is the founder and CEO of University Consultants of America, an independent educational consultancy assisting students around the world with applications to colleges, universities and graduate schools. For more information, call University Consultants of America, Inc. at 1-800-465-5890 or visit www.universitycoa.com
FAMILY MATTERS
Communities and Milestones
By Anu Verma Panchal
A few months ago, I had the good fortune to stand by my parents’ side as they celebrated a significant milestone, their golden anniversary. One of my favorite parts of the event was that in addition to uncles, aunts and cousins, we had with us their closest friends, the extended “framily” that had helped my parents recreate a sense of home and family when they were thousands of miles away from the place of their birth.
Circa 1980, with a toddler and 6-year-old in tow, my parents moved to a little town in Zambia called Kabwe. They knew no one and nothing about this new country beyond my dad’s offer letter and one phone call with a relative who had once lived in Africa.
But on their very first evening, there was a knock at the door. It was a young Malayalee couple with two little boys our age. Hearing that a new family from Kerala had arrived, they had stopped by to welcome us. From that one introduction, my parents were immediately absorbed into a group of friends.
The same thing happened every time we moved towns. The news of our impending arrival reached before we did, and we were pulled into existing Malayalee social circles. Our weekends were spent at each other’s houses, uncles in safari suits swilling whiskey, aunties in sarees holding deafening conversations while we ran around and played. As the years passed, my parents grew into the veterans who welcomed new families and organized the elaborate cultural events that gave the community a sense of home away from home.
And all around town – and across the South Asian diaspora – others were doing the same thing. In Tamil, in Bangla, in Hindi, they created communities that served a familial function for each other. Community building seems to be in our genes. Or, as a friend once told me, “We’re like goats ... we can only travel in packs.”
During the college years and in my early 20s, plugging into the local desi community was nowhere close to being a priority; in fact, I reveled in the freedom from it. It was irritating, even, to see the insularity that I imagined permeated those associations. Why move to another country and only hang out with the same people? Why not at least try to assimilate?
It was only when I became a parent that I found myself searching, maybe even yearning, for some small level of connection. I wanted my daughters to learn Bharatanatyam like I had, wanted them to celebrate Hindu holidays and go to the temple occasionally. Does that mean that I want my communities to be restricted by ethnicity, language or religion? Certainly not. I am blessed with close “framily” from many backgrounds, and I enjoy Gasparilla as much as I do Onam and Navaratri.
Yet I am grateful for the generations who came before we did and established everything from the Tampa India Festival to the India Cultural Center so that we now have the option to dip a toe, an ankle or our whole selves in cultural life if we so desired.
A week before my older daughter was due to leave for college, I took her on one of our habitual visits to the Hindu temple here in Tampa. By a happy coincidence, the pujari on duty that day was the same one who had presided on the day that we had taken her on her first temple visit when she was a 6-month-old baby. “You’re the one who carried her to the front of the room when she was born, and now she’s starting college,” I told him. He beamed. “Look at that!” he marveled.
Look at that indeed. That kind of continuity doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of hard work from a lot of people who came before us, many of whom we’ll never even know. The roots they put down gave us the luxury to pick and choose how much we want to hold on to, because some variation of it has been preserved here for us.