He Still Needs to Be Inspired.
I took Dylan to see a college during the fall overnight visit program. While he’s seen nearly a hundred colleges, and taken student tours at about two dozen, he had never spent the night on a campus.
One of the reasons I started touring so early with Dylan was to inspire him to keep his “eye on the prize,” although there was never any guarantee that the prize (college) would be available to him. I remember that, years ago, when Dylan was still in early middle school, we visited a private school for kids with ADHD.
Dylan loved to create and build, so he said, “I want to go to MIT!”
The admissions counselor quickly excused Dylan from the room. She looked at me earnestly and said, “You don’t want to get his hopes up for college, and certainly not for MIT. A lot of these kids don’t even graduate from high school.”
These kids…? She’d only known Dylan for ten minutes. How could she put a hardcore limit on his abilities without seeing what he could actually do?
We went the other direction with our son. We started looking early and examining closely for several years. As a result, Dylan did visit MIT (although he didn’t like being in the city). He has applied to ten colleges and has spent the night on a college campus.
But he was nervous going in, so I told him that his exploration of this college was two-fold: to decide if this college would be a good fit for him, and to decide if he is, indeed, ready to go to college next fall.
The college billed itself as “unapologetically academically rigorous,” and I knew that going in.
Dylan has a whole senior year to complete before he goes anywhere. He still needs to be inspired to do his best work in high school.
“Mom,” he said after his night on campus. “I still want to go to college, but it might be nice to take a year off before I go.”
“You mean it might be helpful if you learn how to live on your own before also going to school on your own?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Obviously, no decisions have been made one way or another. But he may have a point.