Brennan Barnard - The Truth about College Admission Workbook: A Family Organizer for Your College Search

The Truth about College Admission Workbook

A FAMILY ORGANIZER
FOR YOUR COLLEGE SEARCH

Brennan Barnard and Rick Clark

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Baltimore

2021 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Johns Hopkins University Press

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Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

www.press.jhu.edu

ISBN 978-1-4214-4263-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4214-4264-8 (ebook)

Illustration Credits: Reprinted with the permission of Adam Zyglis.

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Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

For our children, AJ, Elizabeth, Rebecca, and Samuel

We love you and we are proud of you!

Students, we created this workbook as a resource for you. We know you are smart, motivated, and willing to put in the thought and time necessary to ensure your admission experience is not a passive one but rather an opportunity to reflect, stretch, grow, and learn.

In this hands-on guide, our goal is to help you engage fully and meaningfully in your college search, application, and decision and to assist you in proactively initiating important conversations with your family along the way.

Ideally you will take advantage of every exercise in this guide, but it is also designed to allow individuals, families, and schools to select those activities most helpful and applicable to a students unique experience. Our hope is that you will adapt these resources and share them, in order to lead a less transactional and more intentional and educational experience of searching for and applying to college.

Each chapter mirrors those in our book The Truth about College Admission: A Family Guide to Getting In and Staying Together. While we suggest reading the book first as context, this workbook was developed to stand alone as well. Here, each chapter begins with a brief overview of a topic and offers some general thoughts to help you frame your approach to the exercises. What follows is a series of sections with exercises that you, the student, are meant to complete. Any section fronted by the word family, such as Family Forward, addresses your parents or other family members who are involved in your admission experience. These sections have exercises for your family members to complete that are identical or similar to your exercises. And sections titled Come Together, which appear at or near the end of chapters, are meant for you and your family members to read together. In these, we invite you and your family members to share what you have all learned and discuss how it applies to your college search. The one exception to this pattern is , the whole of which student and family are meant to read together.

Our hope is that you will write down your responses to questions and fill in forms as completely as possible. As you move through the admission experience, it will be helpful to refer back to your exercises and trace the evolution of your search.

Authors Note: As educators and admission professionals, we believe strongly in the power of higher education to transform lives and benefit both the individual and society, but we also acknowledge that the path to college is not for everyone. This workbook is written for students and families who have decided that pursuing a college degree is both valuable and important. Our intention is to provide a guide for those navigating college admission that is more healthy, broad, and unified than we commonly see. We use the words family and parents as catchall terms to simplify the flow of our recommendations. We are aware, however, that families come in all shapes and sizes and that parents could include guardians, grandparents, or other trusted adults who are supporting young people through this experience. We want to honor the power of family as representing connection and community in helping students both dream and plan for their future. Although we focus our recommendations on traditional college-age students, we hope this workbook will serve as a valuable resource and important conversation tool for anyone engaging in the college search and application journey.

At a conference in Newport, Rhode Island, a few summers ago, I (Rick) entered my name in a raffle to take a helicopter tour. On the day of the drawing, the organizer announced her 2-year-old son would be selecting the three lucky winners. I almost stood up instantly because I knew one of the spots was mine. Im not sure what it is exactly, but me and 2-year-olds... we get each other. And sure enough, my name was the first one called.

A helicopter tour is completely different from a plane ride. When you board a plane, you are almost singularly focused on where you are going. Destination is king. Delays, reroutes, snoring passengers, lack of coffee, and turbulence are frustrating, annoying, scary, or some combination of all of these (looking at you, flight 225). Unfortunately, that is the same approach many students take when they search for and apply to colleges. They want to know what the rules are, how to avoid the pitfalls, and the smoothest path to a specific campus.

In contrast, a helicopter tour is not about getting somewhere in particular, because you end up landing in the same spot you started from. Instead, it is about adjusting your vantage point, exploring, appreciating, changing your perspective, and enjoying the experience with the people alongside you. That is what this workbook is all about. Our goal is to help you tour with vision and confidence versus flying through anxiously. Ultimately, the exercises and activities that follow are more about how you arrive on a college campus than precisely where you land.

Try this

Before we go any further, lets play a quick word association game. (Do not skip this or skim down the page.) Write down or think quickly about the first three to five words or phrases that come to mind when you read or hear the word college.

1. 1.
2. 2.
3. 3.
4. 4.
5. 5.

Having asked this question around the country in various cities and communities, particularly when parents are in the room, the responses are usually extremely hopeful and life-affirming. We see a lot of smiles and hear answers such as friends, fun, travel, sports, and studying, because ultimately college is exciting! College is an adventure. College is filled with opportunities.

Now write down or think quickly about the first three to five words or phrases that come to mind when you read or hear the words college admission.

1. 1.
2. 2.
3. 3.
4. 4.
5. 5.

Boo! Who popped the balloon? How can adding one word steal the hope and joy and excitement of college? Answer: it shouldnt. It does not have to be that way. And there are a few easy ways to prevent that from happening to you.