College

My daughter is in her senior year of high school and in the midst of the college application process. Tonight her school sponsored a "Senior Parents Night" where the guidance counselors went over the college admissions process. It was mostly stuff that we knew already but we did get a couple of keen insights which I'll list below so that I can remind myself in the months to come:

1. This is their process not ours
2. Our college experience is so old that it is irrelevant
3. We should not be making this the major topic of conversation in our house or with other parents that are going through the same thing
4. We need to guide them but not make decisions for them

This is hard for me since from where I sit it seems like so much fun. I'm just finishing a book called "The Gatekeepers" by Jaques Steinberg a New York Times reporter who I happen to know. He follows a year in the life of an admissions office as Wesleyan College in Connecticut. It's really fascinating but shows you how twisted the whole process is. Maybe I'm glad that I really didn't participate when I was a teen. I've found that where you go to school doesn't really matter except perhaps for the first job. I think that I boast more of my humble Brooklyn College education than others boast of their Ivy credentials. In the end the cliche holds true, I believe, it is what you make of it.