It Makes Me Feel Like I Have Control.
I am swamped with college tours. My head is spinning with organizing the trips, preparing statistical paperwork, reading college books and prepping Shane for every possible collegiate option.
I love it. In fact, next to planning a Disney vacation, this is the most fun I’ve ever had.
I am a member of several online college admissions groups. When I can’t find anyone to talk to about colleges, I read. Currently I’m re-reading Colleges That Change Lives and Princeton Review’s 387 Best Colleges. Given that I devoured these books when Dylan was searching, and that some of Shane’s top choices are featured in both books, I’m actually on my third time through.
Over the summer, I devoured two phenomenal books written about the admissions process: Who Gets In and Why and Valedictorians at the Gate. I’ve requested another book through the interlibrary loan because my library doesn’t have it. It’s called The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College.
I have no interest – nor does Shane – in Ivy League colleges. It’s not his style.
But it’s not about his style. I’ve recently read books about college essays and financial aid secrets. I’ve enjoyed autobiographies by people who got through grad school debt-free, cheated their way into Harvard, and quit the admissions grind for greener pastures. I’m still debating whether or not I want to read about the celebrity admissions scandal. Some things, I may not want to know.
I spend hours preparing stat sheets for Shane for each college we visit. He likes to look at the numbers, and I like to compile them. His interests focus primarily on whether or not the average GPA of a college is too low – or too high – for his liking, and what percentage of students graduate in four years. These are important to him so I print them in a brief document as a reminder before he steps onto a campus.
I pull together student reviews for him, too, from online sites. These reviews are amazingly helpful in letting him know what life is really like at any given university. They give him clues about what to look for, and what questions to ask during his visit.
Shane has applied to 12 of his 14 chosen colleges already. He doesn’t need any of this. The visits are sufficient, maybe overkill. He’s done a zillion Zooms with all of these schools. He knows what he likes, what he doesn’t – what he wants, what he doesn’t. Shane is going to make his own choice, and he certainly hasn’t read any of the admissions books that I’ve been reading.
I’m reading them just for fun. I am obscenely fascinated by college admissions. I’m fascinated in exactly the same way I was fascinated by baby deliveries before I gave birth for the first time, when I watched a thousand episodes of A Baby Story on TLC.
Reading, studying, preparing… it makes me feel like I have control over what happens next. I don’t, of course; I’ve had no control the entire time. Shane has all the control – Shane, and God.
After a thousand episodes of A Baby Story, my own brutal, two-day delivery ended with a traumatized newborn and an emergency C-Section. My second delivery was worse. Watching that show now makes me nauseous.
We’re down to our last three college visits for the fall. In the past six weeks, we’ve toured eight schools in six states. We’ll be visiting three additional states for the last three schools. And then …
Who knows? The results are entirely out of my control.
So I am hanging onto the process with the death grip of someone who is about to lose everything.