Inside the Admissions Office: What Colleges Really Look For—and How Parents Can Help Without Hurting

Parents, is your teen college ready? Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, or excited about your teen applying to college? Do you know what colleges are looking for? And if your kid gets in, do you know what you'll pay for it? College admission has never been so competitive or expensive. Shellee Howard will take you on a journey to help you and your teen get college ready. Now here's your host. Shellee Howard.

I often tell students their job is not to reject you. Their job is to find why you would be a good fit at their school.

My question is always, if you had it to do all over again, what would you do? Because all I need you to say is, I should have reached out to my teachers, I should have asked for help, I should have dropped the class. Whatever the explanation is, we can all relate to it. Is because that authenticity throughout the application, your story, your narrative, what you've done well, what you want to do well in the future, and what you haven't done well. Those are all things that make people really interesting and really three-dimensional.

Well, families, we're back for another episode of Parents, Is Your Teen College Ready? And I am so excited to share our next guest, truly Dean of Admissions, Ms. Karen Christophe. Welcome to the show.

Oh, Shellee Howard, it's such a delight to be here. Thanks for having me.

So we are going to hear things from the admission side. So many of you had— have asked in the past, can we hear it from the college themselves? And man, wait until you hear the wisdom that we're about to share. But before we dive in, I always like to ask one simple question. Karen, are you doing what you thought you would be doing when you were in high school?

Oh my goodness. Absolutely not. It turns out there's not even a college major called college admission. So I think I just never wanted to leave an institution of learning. So I stumbled into this and then 36 years later, here I am, right? No, I hadn't. I think maybe I either wanted— I loved music when I was in high school. And so I thought maybe I could make a career out of it. Turns out that's not so easy. And then I thought I might do business and turns out that's not as fulfilling as this work is. So I am a lifelong higher ed person, which is not even what is, continues to be a really appealing, wonderful, it fills my bucket kind of career.

Ah, I agree. Helping, inspiring, fully, fully understand. So let's go ahead and dive in. Let's start with your background, cuz I want families to understand you didn't just wake up one day and become part of admissions. What would that path look like of somebody like yourself?

Such a great question, Shellee, because I think for many of us, when we were in college, we might have had some peripheral contact with the admission office. So generally speaking, like a tour guide. So we enjoyed our experience and we said, hey, we could make some money, maybe not helping in the dining hall, but maybe taking people around campus and telling stories of what we do and what our friends do. So I was like everyone else. I started as a tour guide. And then it was one of those jobs at the entry level where if you liked to travel— so I was kind of cool with traveling in 1988. My first year was a little different than it is now. But I like to travel. I love to meet people. I think the thing about the job that's super challenging, and I love to inspire students to think about doing it, is you spend so much time doing the marketing and public relations and I'm going off to Boise next week to recruit some students for Colorado College. Then in about 2 more months, I'll be sitting and reading applications for weeks on end, which is a much more solitary sort of task or much more engaging your brain. So it really is one of those careers that everything changes every 3 months. Just when I can't go on one more trip and I hate the idea of packing the suitcase, I'll be reading wonderful essays and hearing about wonderful high school students. And their aspirations for college. And then we'll go back to getting them excited to say yes to us, and then we'll start the cycle again. So while my campus is settling into fall semester, I'm already thinking about the students who will be here at Colorado College in a year. So it, it is one of those things where you start at a lower level and then you just begin to figure out which parts of it you're interested in and you take a leap of faith. I've always heard that women never wanna take a job until they're 100% qualified. So for all of the, aspiring females out there, take a risk, say yes to a job that might seem a little bit daunting because you're probably smarter than you're giving yourself credit for.

Starting with inspiration already.

I can—

so let's talk about this for a minute. I have many students who I get the opportunity to support. My— just side note, my son actually led— hey, so anyway, side note, I thought that was so funny. The people who are listening, and I've heard it's so hard to get into college. I've heard it's so expensive. I just don't even know if we can even manage this. It just overwhelms me, so on and so forth. So what are colleges looking for?

Right. Such a great question. And I want to just, if we could zoom this back to 10,000 feet, there are definitely colleges that do not admit many students. They admit single digits. They admit 5%, 3%, 4%. But it is a fact that more than half of the colleges and universities in the US admit more than half of the students who apply. You would think that our obsession with these colleges that have a single-digit admission rate would be really what it's about. So I think part of the fit question is around looking at what are your particular statistics. Just because it's hard to get into doesn't mean it's the best college, right? And the best college for you is the one that checks off all your boxes. It could be very competitive. It's not my job to crush somebody's dreams when they want to get into a school that admits 5%. But the reality is, if you were off to your favorite restaurant, but there's only a 5% chance that your favorite entrée was on the menu tonight, you might not go. You might not say it's worth fighting the LA traffic or what— New York traffic to get there. Um, if you understand that you will do your best, but lots of things you can't control. But there are plenty of us that are in that, you You gotta be a good student. You have to help us understand why you wanna be at our institution, that you're going to take advantage of opportunities to visit if you can, or a virtual visit, or when we have these extra questions on the application, some questions that you've done a little bit of research, right? You really are demonstrating to us that you kind of— the way as an applicant you wanna be seen and understood in the process, we want you to see us as institutions. Institutions, as colleges, that, you know, Colorado College or any college is a deliberate decision, and you can help us understand why you've decided to do that, right? Because so much of it is we're looking for great students, and there are a lot of great students out there. So you've got to do all the things, the great advice you're giving, I'm sure, about doing well in your classes, really doing well in your writing samples, giving yourself time, choosing folks to write on your behalf that will be exciting cheerleaders for you. But also there's things you can't control. You can't control control how competitive an institution is. You can control how much you've prepared yourself and given yourself the time and space to get to know the place. And these days, oh my gosh, like, I first started admission, we didn't even have email. So now we have email, we have social media. You can hear it directly from, you know, a lot of students tell me, I want to get the vibe, right? And the vibe you can get on Instagram, the vibe you can get on TikTok, right? Check out the multiple ways in which people at our institution are talking about the place and If this appeals to you, like jigging, if this doesn't appeal to you, there's lots of other great places out there.

So good. So parents, I hope you're listening and I hope you're really taking this in. It really is about the fit. How do we find the perfect fit college? Before we go to the fit, which is something that I really wanna talk about, I'd like you to share with families if you can, I don't want to get too deep into the weeds, but what does it look like when they hit— the student hits send on the application? Everybody's like, it's a mystery. Does it even show up on anybody's computer? Like, generally, or as much as you can offer, what does that even look like so a family can be like, deep breath, like, it's not so scary?

Yeah, mostly when a student hits send, it goes into our database. So everything is transmitted electronically. And usually what happens is the entire application does not come in all at once. So when we get an application from a student, we're like many institutions where we give them a password, a username and a password. Then they have access to a portal of sorts where they can go in and see, oh yeah, I haven't sent this document or that document, or I'm applying for financial aid and this is still missing or that's still missing. So we would encourage you once you apply to open up emails we send you because those are going to be informational, right? Oh, here's the deadline. Don't forget. Oh, and then you could write to us. If you get my letter of recommendation from Ms. Howard, right? Did you get what I was supposed to send in? And then we can communicate with them, right? You're missing your letter of recommendation, or we've got a question about something. But basically, it sits in an electronic holding tank until a couple things happen. All of the required documents are in, and we are ready to begin reviewing applications. For many of us there's a set deadline. So for instance, our first deadline at Colorado College is November 1st. So maybe, maybe wondering if I send it in on October 15th, a whole 17 days ahead, do I have a better chance? No, you don't. Because we have a set deadline, we're gonna start reading on November 1st. I don't even actually, I could go back into the weeds to figure out when you applied, but I'm really not interested in that, right? We are gonna just review applications and we're gonna do it kind of all at once. Could matter if schools have priority deadlines or they admit students kind of what they call every 3 to 4 weeks. But generally speaking, there's, as long as you mind the deadline, you don't have to get it in ahead and there's no advantage to getting it in ahead. So I know sometimes get really nervous with their school counselor or a teacher and say, can you get it in 3 weeks ahead? And it's just gonna sit there until we begin the review process. So your goal is really to get things in by the deadline. If some, if some come in a little after the deadline, that's okay. But by 11:59 PM in that school's time zone the night before the deadline, that's when you should aim students get their application in.

Right. So it comes across, the student has everything, and then do you like read everybody's in one day? Or gosh, many of these— I'm asking simple questions. Families have asked me, like, how— so what does that look like? So now everything's in deadline and it's go time.

Well, we spend a couple days training our staff, new staff, returning staff, just to make sure we're all aligned. Uh, we might go through a couple of, like, training exercises, and they let people kind of start slowly, right? We would say, hey, everybody read 10, right? And then we would start into— on every team, but a little differently. On our team, we read 3 days a week, and the expectation— and we read in pairs. So like, I read half of the application, you read half of the application, then we put our minds together to come up with a disposition on the student. And then most colleges have a, have a rubric, a way of sort of assessing where a student fits. So that team would be responsible for reading the application, talking to each other, and then kind of putting an initial destination bin. Do we see the student as very strong? Do we see the student in the middle? Do we see the student as probably not going to be able to be admitted? Right? And so the— is the team is doing, I would say, for the profession, a somewhat leisurely pace, which is 40 a day. That would be considered somewhat leisurely. I've heard more like 50 or 60 more, but we, like, need to move efficiently. But you need to make sure you spent enough time to get to know the human being.

Sure. And, and that's why I tell students, right? They want to know who you are. And if you don't take the time to explain who you are, they're going to move you to the "I don't know" pile. And that's probably not the right pile you want to be in. So you get them into these 3 piles and the first pile is, wow, these are, these are good. What if that pile is too big for the number of spaces you have?

What do you do?

Yeah, that, that pile is too big, right? Because most of us through this process and really like the students that we're seeing. So then we would have something like a committee structure or a group of individuals that would start to narrow down that group. We would— how many financial aid we can offer. So we wanna— if a student needs financial aid, we can admit that student. And so we're trying to look at get— try to guess how many students we need to admit to meet that goal. And some of those maybes we might want to elevate to yeses, right? So there's some clear-cut yeses, and then we might do some adjusting between the yeses and the maybes. There might be someone in that pile where we initially said no that we get some new information, might want to consider. So it's, uh, I think the best way to describe it is shaping. It's sort of thinking about there are— there are admitted 22% of the students who applied last year. I would bet you that 80% could easily do the work at CC. And it was our job to sort of think about, okay, how do we shape a first-year class with diverse interests and experiences and from all over the country and all over the world? And we don't need everybody to love climbing a mountain. We don't need everybody to be a good debater. We don't need everybody to be an English major. And so that's the piece that's harder to control, right? We're not gonna admit everyone who wants to be an English major, but that doesn't mean you're not gonna be admitted 'cause you're not an English major, right? It's really trying to think about the entire composition of the— it's more science, but it doesn't need to be so opaque. I have a family member who has long said that what I used to do when they were paper files is throw them down the stairs. And the one— this is my CFO, so he doesn't know anything about higher ed. But the ones to the bottom step, those are the ones that get admitted. And the ones that don't travel very well down the staircase don't get admitted. It's not random. It's not capricious. But it does have a flow of starting with a big number, winnowing it down, seeing how well you've matched institutional priorities, which is everything from, you know, you need sports teams, you need majors across the curriculum. You might have a new department or program that you're trying to fill, right? And then you're beginning to sort of identify. Who are students that you'd want to have. And you're trying to guess the heart and minds of 17- and 18-year-olds, which you can do all kind of econometric modeling and data analysis, which we all do in the background. And at the end of the day, we can't— we never get perfect, right? You can't— you almost get just as you expect. So you have like a little waitlist here. You might over-enroll, you might under-enroll, but you're— you've got all the voices in your ear telling you this is how many students we want, this is how many beds we have. Don't, don't make us a hotel down the street, um, but also make sure that we have enough, uh, coming in so that we can keep the lights on and the doors open kind of thing, right? It's a, it's a balancing act, I would say.

You said it so well. I often tell students, you know, their job is not to reject you. Their job is to find why you would be a good fit at their school, right? And so the way you put it makes it sound so much less daunting. Now, When you're reviewing the application, do you start from the top of the page to the bottom of the page, or do you start with the essay? Or is there a rhyme or there a reason? Because I tell students that optional question, it's not really optional, and they're like, what do you mean? It says optional. And I'm like, oh, they're so young. So can you give them any little hints, little tricks, anything that, you know, if you were your own child, Yeah, just be mindful of this.

Yeah. So, you know, we generally say application itself, which is, if you think about it, is like, who is the student? Where are they from? What kind of— and there's no right or wrong, right? It's just who are they, right? So you— if I always thought it is, I'm building context about the individual. What city are they from? Community they from? What high school do they go to? Uh, and then getting to know them a little bit more, then we move into like activity list. So what they do outside of class, and I love to see commitment and consistency. You don't need to be the star of everything. And the other myth that I like to bust is we can't all be leaders. Uh, can you imagine a campus of only leaders? I mean, who would— leaders, if we had 2,200 leaders at Colorado College, we'd have zero clubs, um, because they would have— they would club. Um, and then we move into the writing samples pretty soon after that. Then into the, and then into the letters of recommendation. So if you think of it as, you know, what's lovely, human being is completely consistent across all those things. Not always the case. But what I want— in fact, mostly not the case. What I want to do when I get to the end is feel like, okay, like, this is how a student described themselves. This is how a teacher described themselves. Here's what I know about them academically. And I have a full picture of who this individual is. The other advice I always give is if something looks off, you know, you are a student and then you have one semester of Cs. There are probably 10 different interpretations I could have of that, but I mostly need what the correct interpretation is because I could go one way or the other. Wow, this student really wasn't very motivated, or wow, this student must have really had something challenging going on. So don't let me assume because half the time I'll get it right and half the time I'll get it wrong. So make sure we are aware of something that might be a little bit off your usual, or off your usual kind of way of work, or that you are involved in activities. So better just to put that out there rather than our making an assumption about it.

Yeah, you know, that's good for students to hear you say that because they think one semester, one grade even, they're throwing up their hands and they're like, that's it, I'm done, it's over. You know, I think this hasn't learned to fail very much yet.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, and it's OK to fail forward. They're like, we fail forward.

Yes.

Yeah, and you're in the grace of saying, hey, just tell me what happened. I mean—

Yes. Admission people are not perfect. I know this is going to be hard to believe, but I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, and I'm a very flawed human, right? So we all have empathy for that. I think one of the hardest times of the year for me as the dean is when we get final high school transcripts after students have said yes. To Colorado College and their performance has declined. So, you know, my advice, keep your foot on the gas through the end of senior year. It's lovely to get into college and then say, this doesn't really all matter. But let's say you do that. And so I have conversations, not with very many, but with a handful of students. And what I've learned over the years is that if you, if that has happened to you, just own up to it. Just to say, I, I, I, I care and I'm, I'm not a C student and you will never see this grade with me again. And I'll be like, OK, I got it, right? Don't blame anybody else. Own up to what— because failing forward is also acknowledging your own role, not expecting yourself to be perfect, not expecting others to be perfect, but also knowing— my question is always, if you had it to do all over again, what would you do? Because all I need you to say is, yep, I would realize that I wasn't really doing what I needed to be doing. I should have reached out to my teacher sooner. I should have asked for help sooner. I should have dropped the class sooner. Sooner, whatever the explanation is. We can— we can— if you can be honest and authentic, because that authenticity throughout the application, your story, your narrative, what you've done well, you want to do well in the future, and what you haven't done well, those are all things that make people really interesting and really three-dimensional.

That's good stuff. So it's okay, everybody, take a deep breath. It's gonna be okay. Nadine. So as we, you know, think about— there's question of students are asking, is college worth it? Is, you know, there's a lot of— and so I'll get on a call and I'll ask a student, so do you want to go to college? And they look at their parent and I'm like, yeah, I know your parent wants you to, but do you want to go?

Yeah, right.

And sometimes they are hearing the pay, but I didn't do my major right, or I went into massive debt, or I da da da. How do you help those students see the value of what college is all about?

Yeah, it's such a good one. And I think it's one of those situations where part of it is, as students visit campuses, asking themselves, what does this feel like this is going to be for me? What will I learn? I'm a big— I'm a big things you don't learn in the classroom. And so in many ways, psychology, whether you— where you do it, what's out of class. This is why for me, I've worked at 5 small— I went to a small private college. I've worked at only small private colleges that are very mission-driven, that are very much that the experience of what you learn outside the classroom, because you are interacting with people who are different than you, you are relishing differences. You're in a moment of learning. And learning doesn't— the classroom indoor learning is very much about understanding yourself and others. And sometimes people call these soft skills as though they're not very important. And it turns out that employers, even in areas that are very strict like tech, are looking for soft skills. So in many fields, it's not even important to have an undergrad degree, but you might even need a master's degree. But more than that, you need to have had an environment where you need to, like, for example, work on a team. What does it mean to work on a team? What does it mean to have different kinds of learning styles around a table? What does it mean to have a project that you don't get a whole semester to do, but you got to do at work in a week, right? What are those kinds of skills that are developed outside the academic realm? So I'm sort of a big believer in, uh, college is transformative in who you learn about yourself and what you learn about others. As well as the subject that you learn about. So, yes, sure, you can not go to college and learn a skill, and that probably will serve you very well. Plumbers make a lot of money, and there's a lot of dignity in any kind of work that anybody does. But if you're really thinking you want to have multiple careers, you're interested in a variety of different things, that you— those softs are more than just soft. They are really ways in which this, you know, it's sort of think about engineers. Now, there's lots of things you need to learn to be a good engineer. But if you're the person leading the team, there's a whole nother set of skills outside of engineering that you need to know, right? So, you see people that like, I didn't really study, they ended up doing that. But those kinds of team building, project management, able to work in diverse space, having good communication skills, having the ability to think critically, understanding how to speak with confidence, write with confidence, all things you do in college. And you may not even be aware that you're doing them every day, 8 hours a day, but they become incredibly transformative. And then don't even get me started on the alums and the network of people that you now know because of your own institution and their loyalty to the institution and the ways in which you are participating as one of them helps open doors for you— career, life, otherwise. People meet their partners in college. I mean, there's so many which— this is such a transformative— if you haven't changed by the time you get to graduation, you've missed the boat, right? And I think that's one of the challenges too about selecting a college is finding a fit on day one and also finding a place that will grow with you as you grow as a young adult and you begin to sort of understand where you are, how you see yourself in your own world. You know, this is a landscape that we're all living in these days. And just being able to think critically, being able to understand different perspectives, right? Those are, those are so vital to whatever you're going to end up doing in life.

So important. Let's switch gears a little bit to the essay.

Sure.

It's become so important. Maybe it's always, always has been, but it really seems to have a very important piece to the who Right. You know the what. Tell me about the who. Are there any topics that have made your jaw drop or any of them that you've just buried your head? Or are there topics should be mindful not to write about? That's an important thing for them to consider. Yeah.

I don't add topics as such. But there are certainly a lot of what I would call yellow light topics, right? Proceed with caution here, right? It can go off the rails pretty easily. Talking about a breakup, right? That one took off the rails pretty quickly. Talking about something very going on in your life that you don't yet have perspective on. So if your parents got divorced last week and you want to show like, I'm going through this, I think I feel better when you've got some perspective on it. Right? You've got— this is supposed to be a very strong sample of your writing and something you want me to know about you. Right? Like, very vital that I know this thing about you to be able to move forward. So when you pick topics that are challenging, I think we worry about students who are trauma dumping, right? Who are using this opportunity to really talk about something that is really, really hard. I don't want to get to the end of the essay and feel like I want to pick up the phone and call you and say, are you okay? That's not sending the right impression. But let's just say you struggled with something earlier. Maybe your parents got divorced when you were 10. Maybe you struggled with an eating disorder and you're on the other side of it. Those can be really strong essays. But you don't need to make stuff up. I hear a lot of students say, I've just led this kind of boring, normal life. That doesn't sound very compelling. Well, I think human beings are really compelling. And so tell us a really interesting story about this normal, boring life because I bet you have one.

Right?

And I bet you've got something about how you have met a challenge, an experience you've had, a story you want to tell. Uh, my, uh, my 30-year-old nephew wrote his essay about shopping at Kohl's with his little sister, which would not be a topic I'd recommend to anyone else but him. Um, and that was because he, he was 16 at the time and his little sister was 12, and he was a science nerd, and all he wanted to do was talk about SPF and refraction, reflection and refraction, and all I wanted was the cutest pink rhinestone earrings that she could purchase. So it's like, I see science in everyday life. And so his way of expressing that was, I go to Kohl's with my little sister because my mom makes me, but I really am a good big brother. And I see science even in sunglasses department at Kohl's, right? So, so that's like, so it looks for the big story, and I would say tell a small story in a big way, right? Tell us something. You only have 650 words in that main essay. Tell us about a small experience that was really meaningful for you. So there's the, the one that we— a lot of is someone who's influenced me. So if you're gonna write an essay primarily about someone else, one rule of thumb consider is one-third, two-thirds. So if the essay is about someone else, it should only be one-third of the essay. Because mostly I'm not admitting your grandmother, even if she is the most amazing Nana in the universe, right? Uh, Nana's not getting admitted. You're gonna get admitted, right? So I want to hear about Nana. I want to hear about how she's influenced you, but I'd like most of the essay to be about the lessons and how you incorporated them and how they've changed you and how they've influenced you, right? So, so that's why there's not as many bad topics as there are ways in which a topic can get derailed, um, or start to sound— you won't be surprised, you know, here we are at the foot of Pikes Peak in Colorado, we get a lot of mountain climbers who apply to Colorado College. So I've read a lot of mountain climbing essays in 5 years, and I've read some good ones, and I've read some normal ones, and I've read some terrible ones, right? And it's not because I've read too many mountain climbing essays, is that there is the typical mountain climbing essay, and I love when someone else has a different twist on it, right? You don't need to be unique, but you need to put your own signature on it, right? Because your mountain climbing essay is not somebody else's mountain climbing essay, and it's not somebody else's mountain climbing essay, right? So that's— it's sort of your— and fascinate us. Even if I disagree with you, even if you write an essay about a topic I'm like, oh, I don't know, but it's not a research paper. It's not trauma dumping, not trying to convince us you've had the hardest life, as though we only admit students with hard lives. That's not the case, right? But it's your story. It's your opportunity. People call it your voice, but it's sort of your chance to say something more than— and, and that it makes sense within the rest of the application.

What about the mental illness topic? This generation is very passionate about it. They talk about it more than any other generation. I've had students want to talk about some areas of it that it just makes me a little uncomfortable. And I'm like, if I'm uncomfortable, I don't know. So is there any right or wrong when it comes to the area of mental support, mental illness? Yeah.

I think I would start with what I just alluded, which is how far along are you on your recovery? We have read— I hear as we as a collective have read essays where we— where I don't know about your lowest point. Your lowest point really scares me, right? Your lowest point just felt like you're not far enough from your lowest point. Would it be okay to say, like, I've struggled with depression and here's how I've dealt with it and here's what I've learned about myself? That sounds like a good essay to me. That sounds like an essay that's going places, right? But again, it's how much have you metabolized your own experiences and how much do you have the insight to look at it at an arm's length, right? Because if I get to the end of the essay and I'm worried about you, it's going to be very hard for me to make a case for why we would want to admit you. And yet this is a very different generation. We didn't talk about this stuff when I was in high school, right? Like, you just— you didn't talk about, like, I was depressed. And I also think these words are much easier for this generation to say. And depressed may not be clinically depressed, or depressed might be significant. Like, you know, I was hot semester, and that's why I couldn't, right? But I also think— think of this as one of your better moments in life, one of your more insightful moments in life, one of the opportunities you have to tell us a compelling narrative. It doesn't have to be all sunshine and roses. You might have a roses life, or you may not have a sunshine and roses life, but that you're talking about it with some insight and some ability to tell a story with a little bit of arm's length, right? Not in the third person, not in a passive voice, but just to be able to say, like, this is where I was, and this is how I resolved it. And I've learned a lot of resilience, or I've learned this has really given an opportunity to think about how I will meet challenges in college or something along those lines. Right? Like, tell me a story. I think that's really important.

Yeah.

So in conclusion, because I talk to you all day long, all day long, talk to the parents for a moment. There's parents who maybe didn't go to school in the United States. There's parents who did go to school and they applied to one school, they got in, and it was very inexpensive. Now it just feels so different and daunting and heavy and crazy, and social media makes it sound so much worse than it is. What advice can you give parents through this process? Yeah.

So I think that should not— one of this is to find a spot for you in the process, right? You are part of this process, right? So I don't want to tell you that you're relegated to you always have to be 10 steps behind on the college tour. We love it in our office when parents push the student to say hello to the receptionist and give their name when they come for a visit. So you can be modeling that kind of behavior of, I'm going to let you check in when we get to the admission office, right? Other pieces of advice that allow a student to have some autonomy in this is let them talk first. Get back in the car after the college tour. So it's your job to figure out where you're going to have lunch or how far it is to the hotel or whether the GPS is working as expected, but that you're not going to start with your impression of the college. You're going to let them lead when it comes to sort of impressions of colleges. You'll be curious when they say, I don't want to apply to XYZ school. Okay, tell me, tell me why. Interested. If this is like where you went to a place you think they'll be perfect, you just have— it would be perfect for your student. Just give it some time, right? Okay, I hear you. Like, yep, too far away. It's too whatever. And let that sit and then see if you can come back to it later. I'm a big fan of there will only be college talk at certain times. It is heartbreaking the amount of talk that college seniors get about the process. And you think like, we talk about it from time to time, but then there's their high school counselor and there's the friends and there's the neighbor and there's the grandparents. I have literally had students say to me, the hardest part of this process was that everyone wanted to talk about college for 2 straight years. And the message that that is, what's happening in the, in the here and now, not important. It's all about the next step. And living in the present is incredibly important. And enjoying senior year is incredibly important. And not trying to accelerate the process, but also trying to help your student determine where you can be helpful is if your student just needs reminders about deadlines. All right, you and your student figure out, is it a whiteboard? Is it a notes app on your phone? What is it that's going to keep things on track? If families are applying for free, I think that's of course a spot that parents need to be very present and very aware. But I think allowing the student to have some autonomy— what I worry about is parents never want to send this message, but may unintentionally send the message that I don't trust you to manage this. Right? If you say, I'm going to do this for you, or I'm always stepping in. I mean, the admission business has come up so many metaphors, right? The helicopter parent, uh, now the snowplow parent, you know, like you're clearing the right— you're all of these. But I think the idea is parents are part of the, the, the ecosystem and are the orbit, but just be very attuned to what's happening. The, the other thing, uh, the line I, I said at a setting I was with the Dean of Admission at Bucknell, and he said, we got off stage, did you really tell them to go drink? And I was like, no, what I said was, what I own your stress about the process and not impose it on your kid, right? So I said, I don't know, go off to a cocktail party, go to therapy, go to yoga. And he's like, you told them to drink somewhere. I'm like, that's not exactly what I said. But you also have to manage your own stress and try very hard not to let that show because you need to be that, like, when So, you know, not every college they apply to, in fact, most don't get into every college they apply to. So when it's disappointment, you, you gotta, you gotta pull up your pants and just be like, I got this. Like, we're gonna, we're gonna go out, have a letter in the backyard. We're gonna go out for ice cream. We're gonna yell, whatever it is, but helping your, your student deal with failure. It can be that very high achieving students hear a no., and you're not going to be like, I'm calling that admission office in 5 minutes and I'm yelling at that admission dean. You need to figure out how to own that. Like, nope, that is not your job. Um, but your job is to help with it, with the— I still— one place that I worked is— this will be my final anecdote. I could go on all night with anecdotes, but I remember I was on duty at another office where I worked, and a student who had been admitted came with her mother, and I went downstairs to say hello and ask how, you know, what questions they had wanted to do. And the student was standing in front of me, her mom was standing behind, and the student said, I'm good. I'm saying yes. I don't need anything. I came by to say I'm saying yes. And then I saw the mom start sobbing, sobbing. And then the mom went to her bag and pulled out these enormous sunglasses so her mom would not see her crying. And that wasn't because she was unhappy with her daughter's decision to say yes to that particular college. The start of the goodbye, right? And so I think of that and I think parents are going through a lot, which is why I want you to take care of yourselves in the process. But I also want you to know that your child is going through a lot and trying to do what you can to manage your own feelings. Let them own this process. Also know you can grab that enormous— those enormous sunglasses in the middle of a brightly lit living room to let them know you're happy for them just as you are trying to process the sad, you know, which is why students arguing— argue about the best path to the next college or where we're going to go for lunch. It's not about whether they're having sushi or Mexican for lunch. It's about that goodbye is coming, that's coming, right? So it's very high stakes for everyone, but remembering it's the most high stakes for your student.

Wow, that's so powerful. I do remember my firstborn when I left him I do. And it was interesting. It was a hot, hot summer day and his school had no air conditioning and no elevators. We were on the 5th floor. And I'm like, how? What do I pay for? Anyway, all the parents are so hot and so tired and the goodbye is coming. And since at some point you got to leave and parents just started crying and carrying on. And my son looks at me and he says, Mom, why aren't you crying? I said, let me tell you, if you were at home doing drugs on my couch, I'd be crying. I go, I'm leaving you at Harvard, right? Here is done. Then I left, got on the airplane, and sobbed all the way home, right?

Right.

It's— they're watching you, they're listening to you. And the more we can do to let them know that we believe they can do it— so, so impressive. Wow, what a wealth of information you are. If a family has any other, is there some way about your college, about admission, anything like that? Is there some way to reach out to you?

Yeah, what if I pop into the chat? Is that something you do, Shellee? I'm happy to do that. And then if somebody misses it, I'm pretty easy to find. I am officially the oldest member of the Colorado College admissions staff. So look for a 60-year-old that looks sort of like this. You can find my photo. I'm just Kay Kristoff at coloradocollege.edu. So I just posted that to the chat, but feel free to find me on the website or, or ask Shellee Howard for information. I'm really happy to help, and it doesn't necessarily have to be about CC. Just happy to just tell you you're on the right track, tell you you got this. We always end every presentation with students, you got this. And so you got this, and it, it always has a great outcome.

Thank you so much for your time. Of course. Until next time, parents, it takes a village, and we'll talk to you soon.