Gems from Dr. Lisa Damour

If you’ve been following my page for a while, you know some of my favorite college-related podcasts and books. Dr. Lisa Damour is toward the top of my list. She had an another great college episode on March 10. Within the next few days, the seniors will have received all of their admissions decisions. This is obviously a time of very high emotion for seniors as well as their parents.

The picture on my post shows the most important part of this episode in my opinion. A mother wrote in about the fact that her daughter did not build a balanced college list, and now she does not want to go to any school where she was admitted. This brings up a great piece of advice for juniors. It is critically important that juniors create a list of colleges with varying acceptance rates. In addition to being excited about their reach schools, students must also really like their target and likely schools since those are the ones they have the best chances of being admitted to. My juniors and I are just beginning to work on list building now.

For the parents of seniors, Dr. Lisa has a few good pieces of advice in this brief podcast. One of them is to go visit the schools where your teen WAS admitted. There is a chance that once your child actually steps foot on the campus, they will be pleasantly surprised. There is also a chance that they will view the school differently now knowing what their realistic options are. Another tip given in this podcast is to let your teen know that disappointment is the right reaction in this situation and just to sit with your teen in the discomfort without trying to fix it.

Lastly, they reference episode number 187 when they had a conversation with Rick Clark, the esteemed director of admissions at Georgia Tech. That is also worth a listen. The college admissions landscape is constantly changing, but there are some amazing resources out there to help bring clarity to students and families.