Today I want to address directly a group of readers across the nation who are caught up in a most difficult moment of choice. But what I want to say speaks to all the toughest decisions we ever make.
Most people think the month of April starts with the silly jokes of "April Fool's Day." High school seniors and their families know that it starts with those long dreaded and hoped-for college admissions notifications.
Some of you who are in that category had very good news as the new month dawned -- your high school seniors got into the school of their dreams. If you were among these lucky few families, a hearty word of congratulations is in order. A great many other families, as you know, have faced initially less encouraging news.
It's hard to see an eager, hopeful child, of whatever age, receive a piece of difficult news. Perhaps a desperately desired "yes" did not appear. Or your senior now has to choose between two or more alternatives that no one is completely clear about how to compare. The decision might seem impossible. And as a result, there may be a high level of anxiety around your house.
If a choice is being faced, should your child seek to determine and pick the most prestigious of the available options? Or should the selection be made on other grounds?
If you and your senior are among those facing either a recent disappointment, or an apparently difficult choice, I have two pieces of very good news for you. And for any of you who have made a decision and are inwardly waffling, this will help you, too.
The first piece of good news is simple. The ancient stoic philosophers of Rome used to love to say this: Hardly anything in this world is a good as it seems or as bad as it seems, so we should all just calm down.
This is indeed good news, but of course as a philosopher I'm required to point out that, if it's true, then by its own cautions, it's likely not as good as it seems! And yet, we can use it. It matters less what happens to us in this world than what we do about what happens to us. The stoics helped us understand that many roads can lead to Rome, and they should know, since most of them lived there.
So, if you're dealing with a disappointment, allow yourself to get over it as quickly as possible. In the end, it need not derail any of the truly important goods of the future.
There's probably never been a life made or broken by a college admissions decision. It's ultimately not the decision, but rather what we do with the decision that counts. Admissions committees make their choices, and we make ours. They can make mistakes, and so can we, and life can go on quite wonderfully nonetheless. Adaptation, adjustment, confidence, and determined action are the keys.
This is related to the second piece of good news. My old friend Jeff Brenzel, dean of Admissions and Master of Timothy Dwight College at Yale, has long told me that, within an extremely wide range of alternatives, and vastly wider than you might suppose, it matters far less what school a young person goes to than what they bring to that school.
If your child has to make a decision now as to what school to attend, help take some of the pressure off. Few people make their best decisions under great pressure. Choosing a school is not like answering a multiple choice exam question where there is just one right answer and if you get it wrong, you fail.
Any bright teenager can flourish in any number of college contexts. In my many years as a professor, I came to see that. And we each have our own path. My daughter attended one university for four years and loved it. My son attended three in the same period of time. Both are doing very well. Regardless of what has happened, and what will yet happen, this month, and in the coming days, the next adventure that your child has will prepare him or her in surprising and marvelous ways for the one beyond that, and the one beyond that. Life is supposed to be a series of adventures.
So if your child has already made a decision, you can all feel good about it. If your admitted student still faces a choice, encourage that good student to continue gathering as much information as possible, and use imagination as well as intellect to compare and contrast options, to talk about it, and write out pro and con lists about it. Talking and writing clarify our thinking. But, in the end, know that any good decision will move them into position for the next adventure. And how that goes will ultimately be up to them. The decision made now doesn't have to be a perfect one, or by anyone's judgment the best possible one. Life is made of rougher timber than that. And great houses still get built.
If you'd like to think and talk more about the college decision process, and what comes after this month of April, come join me and some friends as we hash it all out at our new website and blog, www.CollegeStraightAhead.com. We'd love to hear your take and your wisdom on all of this.
Follow Tom Morris on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TomVMorris
"Now let me get autobiographical. I almost had a nervous breakdown in 1973. I had been accepted into Providence College, and somehow realized only a few weeks before school started that I had no money saved to attend. I was already registered as an English major because I had no idea what I wanted to do. I basically was planning to attend only because my best friend was going (because his brother was going there - you see a pattern here?) and because Ernie DeGregorio was their starting point guard and drove a yellow Lincoln with the plates "ERNIE D." Now THERE was a solid foundation for college."
"Suddenly, I was melting down under the pressure. The principal of my high school took the time to sit me down and explain that no decision I made at that point was permanent or fatal. I could try school and and leave if it was not right, or stay home, work, and always go back to school later. Neither decision was irreversible."
"I made at the time a tough call, and opted to stay home a year when all my friends went off somewhere to become "college students." I ended up at Syracuse a year later, more mature, and with some idea of what I wanted to do in life. I realized that that had been of the best decisions of my life."
There are many avenues to life success.
"While many parents lose sleep, hair, spouses, fortunes, and sometimes sanity, worrying that their child's choice of or opportunity at (1) the right preschool, (2) the right prep school, (3) the right college or university and (4) the right fraternity or sorority will absolutely dictate their complete success or failure in life, I'd love to tell them about one of the smartest and most successful men I know. He lives in one of the best neighborhoods in Connecticut, in a seven figure house, amid a group of wealthy professionals, golfs at a famous club, and is happy with his life in general. He has always delighted in pointing out to those anxious neighbors that he a) missed preschool, b) went to CT public schools, c) graduated from small college rather than Yale or Harvard, and yet somehow still lived next door to or down that street from: THEM. He was honest and worked hard, made good decisions in life that did not involve many of the options and choices that had been available to his worrying friends in their youth, and yet enjoyed in their great company a rich life. He liked what he did, did it well, and it all paid off."
So, we can shed artificial stress about college decisions! I'll post next more he wrote.