Don't Blink

My friends and coworkers often laugh at my “Southern Sayings” and anecdotes. Over the years of raising children, I have noticed that you go through several, not just one, Rites of Passage. That holds true for both the parents and the child. ?One of the great paradoxes of parenting is that time moves both in slow motion and fast-forward. When I was a young girl, I would hear my mother tell folks that the days are long but the years are fast.?My family has reached the point in our parenting that we are beginning looking at colleges for our oldest child.?The process has changed dramatically since I was looking at colleges with my parents. It is almost unrecognizable.

The entire college application process has changed in the past thirty years. With the invention and consistent development of the internet and internet maps, every square inch of a college is fair game to explore these days. And if the digital age was not enough changing the application process, since COVID the process has been digitalized with a steroid injection. A student can get a “look” inside their library, dorm, cafeteria and the quad with a click of a button.

Many college visits are now being replaced with video chats, virtual tours, and marketing videos. After an hour or two of watching these they all start to look the same, just different colors and buildings. We used these virtual tours and videos to narrow down “the list” to around 5 or 6 school. Much to our surprise, this was not enough for our digital age child. He wanted to visit each campus in person. Not really to have an extensive interview with a College Counselor, to see what the food tastes like, or walk through the book store, but to get a “feel” of the campus and the people.

As close as virtual reality can bring you to a college campus and can help you make a decision on the correct academic institution for you, there is still a human element to the decision process for our family. We will pack up the car and take an old-fashioned road trip to five different college campuses next month. We hope to come home with a list of choices by rank and then we can begin the next step in the process of convincing that school that our child is right for them. To be continued…

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