Your Child’s Dream School Isn’t The Only Option - RedKite

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Your child has just passionately announced his or her dream school…now what?

What is a “dream school” anyway?

Although every college is different – and surely every dream is different – “dreamschools” typically have two things in common:

The school is highly competitive for admissions

The school is well-known for a particular field of study that your son or daughteris especially interested in.

Do your homework

Before you engage in expectation management, do some digging around to learn aboutyour student’s dream school and their preferred field of study.

Understand the field of study your son or daughter is interested in

Before you start to encourage or dissuade your son or daughter from pursuing a careerin Endocrinology, Game Theory, Evolutionary Biology, or Materials Science – makesure you understand what it means. Fields change names, and new fields are beingcreated all the time.

Identify the top schools for this field of study

Now, go check out which schools are best known for this particular field of study. Don’trely on one research tool. Use several. Make a spreadsheet and really impress yourstudent with how much you care. Where does The Illustrious Dream School fall on thelist? Are there other, better schools nearby?

Understand the admissions criteria for The Illustrious Dream School(and other top schools in this field of study)

Now start to dig in and understand how your student’s profile (grades, admissions tests,etc.) compare to that of the typical student admitted to The Illustrious Dream Schooland other schools like it. Now is also a good time to identify which schools you canrealistically afford. Use the Red Kite Matching Engine to get a better grasp on what typeof financial aid is available to you and your student.

Great Expectations (Managed)

Armed with all this extensive research, you are prepared to help your studentunderstand the chances of gaining admission to his or her dream college. You know thedrill. If your student’s profile is similar to or better than those of recently acceptedstudents, you can encourage him or her in good conscience. If your student’s profilefalls a bit short of those recently accepted, you can help bring some reality to thesituation and perhaps readjust expectations.

Ah, but here’s the thing: because you’ve done your homework, you understand yourstudent’s preferred area of study, and where that program is offered. That means thatyou can help your student pursue his or her passions by offering assistance withapplications to other schools that have the same program as the dream school!

Suddenly you’ve re-framed the conversation. It’s no longer this binary “should you, orshouldn’t you, apply to your dream university?”

Now, you are having a conversation that sounds like: “Let’s list and rank order (in orderof likelihood of acceptance) all of the schools that are good for your field of study.”So much less pressure. Nice work, Mom and Dad.

The “Sameness Trap”

After you’ve done your homework, you’ll probably feel like a sports fan who can rattleoff the stats of a favorite baseball player. You’ll be able to recite the typical GPA,SAT/ACT score, and class rank of students admitted to The Illustrious Dream School.

Let’s get something straight – those stats are definitely important. But don’t get stuck inwhat I like to call the “sameness trap,” where you think that your student must, in everyway, resemble the typical student. Not true. Your student can – and should – be him orherself.

The admissions offices of colleges and universities try to craft a well-balanced enteringclass. They don’t want everyone to be the same. A friend of mine – an admissionscounselor at a highly competitive school – once told me, “Look, we could fill our entireentering class with only valedictorians who volunteered at homeless shelters. But wedon’t . . . because we want our entering class to represent lots of different viewpoints.So we accept lots of different types of students.”

So, knowing that, what do you do?

One strategy is to highlight your student’s unique interests and experiences. Highlightthe clubs and programs where he or she has demonstrated a real, enduring passion.Say, your student – who is applying to be pre-med – is really interested in FrenchLiterature.

Encourage him or her to talk about French romantic poets, or about experience intutoring classmates in French, and research into your student’s French ancestry. Thisallows your student’s true self to shine through.

Oh, and aside from making your student a more compelling admissions candidate, you’llbe subconsciously praising the deepest parts of his or her identity.

Course Correcting

After all of your strategic planning, guess what? Your student may decide that TheIllustrious Dream School isn’t the best choice. Or that really interesting field of studyisn’t so interesting. Or both! This is not a sign of immaturity or fickleness. Quite theopposite, actually!

If you (as the parent) have done your homework and shared it with your student, you

want his or her ideas about dream schools to change and mature. Indeed, let’s praiseour kids when they kick the tires on their dreams and sometimes change their minds.

They learned that smart lesson from us!