I was overwhelmed.
Then I was deliberate.
My firstborn was about to be a freshman.
I was up to my eyeballs in health forms, bus routes, placement tests, pick-a-language, wood shop vs theater. What I wanted for my kid was to have a great high school experience and a lot of choices for college in four years. The school was just concentrated on getting him to his first day of class.
I knew that the rules for getting into college had changed since (insert my kids making fun of me) the 20th century. I just didn’t really know how. I must have watched five hundred TikToks and YouTube videos, read dozens of newsletters, listened to too many podcasts and sat through a pack of those “1 hour introduction” Zoom calls that every advisor offers. Everybody had advice. Everybody sounded sure of themselves. And plenty of them completely contradicted another.
A ton of the advice seemed like it was delivered too late. “Your student should have started…” “By junior year, they should already…” I was happy I was digging in early.
I didn’t want to become one of those parents wishing my student had a time machine as they started their college application. I wanted a plan. So I started with “what story would my son want to tell in three years?” If he wanted leadership by junior year, where did that start? If he wanted a hard class schedule, how do we build it? If he wanted a meaningful summer job, what needed to happen before that summer arrived? Then I rolled the whole thing back to the summer before high school. Then I rolled it forward semester by semester.
To build this out, we sorted through a lot of opinions. Advice from admissions readers. Guidance counselors. Families who had already been through it. And, honestly, a few people who just liked to talk. We turned it into a guide that shows parents where their student’s energy can have the most impact at each point in high school, along with specific things they can do to keep moving forward.
Maybe your student is about to start freshman year. Maybe junior year is right around the corner. Either way, there is a deliberate path from where they are now.
It is not your climb. It is your student’s. But all great climbs begin with a plan.