Top Tips for a Less Stressful College Application Process

By DC College Counseling

The college process can be overwhelming. If you’re reading this post, you probably know that already! Parents want to spend their children’s last couple of years at home enjoying time with one another… but all too often, nagging and stress about applying to college can get in the way. We have helped hundreds of families navigate through this time, and are here to offer some of our top tips for keeping your stress level down and family relationships intact!

1. Start Early

We can’t emphasize this enough! The one thing that is guaranteed to raise parent and student stress levels is rushing to get an application submitted by the deadline. At DC College Counseling, we require that our students have every application submitted a minimum of two weeks before the deadline, and most of our students actually click submit months before! https://www.dccollegecounseling.com/

If you are the parent of a junior or senior, welcome to the active part of their college admissions process! Juniors should be spending the next couple of months thinking critically about their extracurricular profiles, building their college lists, and taking advantage of those fall and winter breaks to complete college visits. After the holidays, essay work can begin! Winter and spring should involve the completion of the main college essay, initial supplemental essay work, and the compilation of content for counselor and teacher letters of recommendation. 

The earlier juniors start, the more they can stretch out this work over a longer period of time. Nothing will seem particularly overwhelming this way, and everything will be done before senior year begins - eliminating the need to juggle senior-level coursework alongside college essays!

If you already have a senior and haven’t gotten very far in the process, don’t panic! Keep reading for more tips that can help your family keep the stress levels at bay.

2. Stay Organized

If you are working with an independent consultant or a dedicated school counselor, you may already have an organizational system in place to keep track of your applications (we use Asana with our students, which you can read more about on our blog). But if you are tackling this process as a family, it is critical to make sure that everyone is on the same page throughout the process. Staying organized and knowing all of the deadlines and components for each application is crucial to maintaining your sanity! 

One actionable tip is to maintain one list that you can update in real time. An app like Asana or Trello can work well for this, but even a Google Sheet that both parents and students can access will work wonders here!

On a related note, it is vitally important for your student to do their research about which application components each of their schools require and when. There could be “hidden” essays that they don’t immediately see on the Common Application, or earlier deadlines for scholarship consideration that are not widely advertised. Their organizational system is only as good as the information they have, so make sure they keep track of all those deadlines and they won’t sneak up on your family!

3. Balance Your List

Every spring, our inbox fills with panicked emails from parents of seniors whose students have “no options” after admissions decisions come in. This is usually code for a student that has applied to a ton of reaches, with maybe one or two safeties that they haven’t thought too much about, or even ones that they actively do NOT want to attend. 

One of the easiest ways to minimize stress is to have a balanced list that is full of schools that will make your student happy! Without a doubt, there are some fantastic, less selective schools that your student might really love to attend, and that will provide a great education.

If you’re wondering whether your student’s list is balanced, ask to see scattergrams on Naviance or Scoir (software that most high schools use to track application data from their own applicants). Parents are often shocked when they see, for example, that no student from their child’s high school has been admitted to Duke in ten years - but wouldn’t you rather know this kind of information in advance?

Doing just a bit more research up front, particularly when it comes to likely and target schools, can give your student a lot of breathing room later in the process. No matter what happens, they will have several options they love!

4. Ask for Help

Depending on your situation, your student probably has varying levels of support when it comes to the college admissions process. Some school counselors have smaller caseloads than others, some families choose to work with an educational consulting firm like ours, and some students have older siblings that just went through the process and can pass on valuable insight. No matter which camp your student falls into, it is important to make sure they have a support system and are seeking help when they need it.

If it fits your budget, bringing in some professional help can ease your stress - whether that is an educational consultant, a test prep tutor, or an essay coach. But there are plenty of free resources, too, that your student can maximize for help with the process. We particularly like the “College Admissions” course from Khan Academy, which walks students through much of what they need to know. If your student is a  junior just beginning their search, we also recommend creating an account on the Princeton Review’s website and checking out YouVisit for virtual tours. 

No matter who you are, don’t be afraid to ask for help and reach out to others during this time! The college admissions  process can be difficult and intense, and you don’t need to go through it alone.

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For more tips, check out our Less Stress Parenting webinar on Wednesday, September 29, presented by Illuminos and Staying Ahead of the Game. We hope to see you there!

How to Get Organized

Written By: Coach Nathaniel Jenkins

The ability to organize is an under-discussed skillset. Organization is a tedious stepping stone that requires constant maintenance in efforts to meet our next goal or deadline. As I am sure you know, organization is acutely important in day to day life whether we acknowledge it or not; this can be a frightening thought for many, especially for young minds with executive functioning hardships or ADHD. You may have heard something along the lines of “I would like to become more organized, but I don’t know where to start!” or “I know where my stuff is and that is all that matters!” As is true for most things in life, just because one way works for an individual does not mean that it will work for another. Organizational skills are not simply taught through a “one size fits all” approach because no one student is exactly alike. For some, the thought of being disorganized is unfathomable, but for others, it's just a part of life. An article called “How to Help Yourself Get Organized” by the Child Mind Institute https://childmind.org/article/how-to-help-yourself-get-organized/ provides insight on how young minds may work and think of organization.

      Young minds are malleable and have incredible amounts of potential to soak up a lot of information. It is imperative to promote day to day routines focused on staying organized to carry out tasks of all difficulty levels with more peace of mind. Organization is not tactical, it is strategic, but it may require various different tactics, or approaches, to get your student on track to becoming self-sufficient in their organizational abilities. According to the article “How to Help Yourself Get Organized,” the most important “universal tips” for success when learning organizational skills are to do the following:

·         Write it down.

·         Put the same thing in the same place every time.

·         Make easy-to-lose things bulky.

·         Breaking overwhelming tasks into smaller, more manageable pieces.

·         Keep it simple.

            Let’s include these points into steps for instilling a sense of confidence to develop organizational skills in your student.

1.       If at first you don’t…. find an approach that is successful, test new approaches until you find one that works! Don’t stress it if several approaches don’t work as expected. Trial and error is a part of life. You will find what your student responds to in time. Positive reinforcement in general will go a long way in promoting life skills such as organization.

2.       Weaknesses, we all have them. Understanding weaknesses and tackling them head on is key in life in general, but especially in the life of a student lacking executive functioning skills. For these students, the sense of having a “weakness[es]” may be heightened and identifying weaknesses you may observe as the parent, teacher, etc. in your student may be different from what the student would classify as their weaknesses. Communicating to identify these shortcomings will significantly help in the long run.

3.       Methods for success. These methods may include specific items or words of affirmation or whatever it is your student positively responds to. Would a physical calendar full of handwritten notes of when homework, exams, etc. are due be a successful method for your student? Or would having the student write on a notepad or even an app for notes in their phone help? The key to successfully instilling a sense of organization in your student is to focus on what works for them.

4.       Don’t stress the planning aspect of becoming organized. The thought of attempting what to do to become organized can be daunting, but simple small steps will show the most success and will build over time into a fluid routine of maintaining organization in day to day life. The methods mentioned in step 3 may not be immediately useful so find what works piece by piece.

The key to all of this is understanding that your student is learning a new skill set altogether that does not have its own class subject at school. Your student who faces complications with executive functioning has a lot of potential to put their energy into becoming organized and maybe even one day enjoying the sense of accomplishment that organization brings. Finding what works for your student will not only help instill a valuable life skill, but will also help them to succeed in academics and whatever life may throw their way.

What are Executive Functioning Skills?

Written by: Coach Lauren Bachand

Executive functioning skills are those higher cognitive skills that are required to successfully plan and carry out various actions during the day. They include attention, planning, prioritizing, and organization. They are used for memory, reflection, and inhibition control. But what exactly is the big deal with executive functioning? And why get a tutor that focuses specifically on planning and organization instead of your child’s “problem” subjects and poor grades? 

Well to start, the reason for academic failure normally has little to do with a lack of understanding the information and more to do with the processing and storing of the information. Executive functioning skills, or EF for short, are those skills controlled by the frontal lobe of the brain. This is the last part of the brain to develop and mature, but it is also the most influenced during childhood development. Just like academic subjects in school, EF skills are learned, however they are not necessarily intuitive.   

Let’s take a look at our lives as adults to help conceptualize what they are, and role our EF skills play in our daily lives. 

For many of us, our day actually starts the night before. We might set an alarm, or check to ensure our alarm is set for the right time. (And, if you are anything like me- set a second, and a third. Just in case.) The next morning when you wake up, you prioritize the first things to do without much thought. Maybe one child struggles with getting up in the morning, or has to be to school earlier than the others, so you wake them first. You get dressed, set out breakfast, create your children’s lunches, or pull aside cash for hot meals. When you arrive at work you check your emails. You effortlessly categorize and prioritize which ones to answer before your 10 o’clock meeting. That afternoon you use Google Maps to determine the best route to get to your children’s school in time for pickup. You notice there is an accident, adjust your route and call the school to let them know you may be late. Once you arrive home you realize you are out of milk and write a memo to pick more up the next day. You look in the pantry, problem-solve, and cook dinner. You usher your children to bed, and then it is time to start all over again. 

 As an adult, you used your EF skills naturally and unconsciously. You adapt, problem-solve, and overcome obstacles with little second-thought. A child, especially once with learning differences which create EF deficits, may run into numerous bumps in the road during your day. They might forget to set their alarm the night before and wake up late, take too long answering emails and miss the morning meeting, see an accident on the route and not adjust or call the school to warn about being late, or they might forget to write the memo for milk. 

 If we were to translate this information to your child’s everyday life in an academic setting, you might notice that they forget to write down the deadline for an upcoming project. They might spend too long working on a homework worksheet that is only worth five points, instead of studying for a test that is worth 50 points. They might pick a topic to research that is too challenging, but they do not adjust the subject or ask the teacher for help. Or, they might forget to bring their textbooks home to complete their homework. 

 While your child’s academic coach will work with them on developing these skills during their sessions, it is also important they are developed daily around the house. So what are some things you can do to help your child develop and mature their EF skills, maximizing their future success? Well, to start the best (and easiest) way is to model the behavior yourself. 

 Here are four easy ideas to do together with your child:

• Create a wall calendar for you and your child

Calendars are a great way for anyone to stay organized and on top of their game. It is the perfect way to foster planning, time management, scheduling skills, and foresight. 

Begin with buying one large dry erase calendar (22in by 18in) for yourself and one for your child. These can be found on Amazon. Then, set aside one night at the end of the month, like the last Sunday, to sit with your child and schedule out the month in advance. Add work deadlines, appointments, and reminders on your calendar, while encouraging your child to fill in the deadlines for large assignments, tests, and extracurricular activities such as sports practices and tournaments on theirs. Then, create the habit of marking off each day together before going to bed. Children are visual learners, and being able to see approaching deadlines help them prioritize and schedule appropriately. 

•  Create a nightly checklist for you and your child

Checklists are a great way to foster organization and other skills needed to prioritize tasks. It provides a sense of accomplishment, and help reduce stress and anxiety. 

Begin by having you and your child create two or three goals you would like to complete by the end of the next day. These goals can be work/academic related, or they can be broader goals like remembering to wash the dishes or making a doctors appointment. At the end of each day, sit with your child and mark off which goals were met. For goals that weren’t met, ask questions such as “what prevented me from doing this goal today?” This tip can be used to foster a sense of accomplishment, be used as an incentive for “screen time” or another “fun” activity your child enjoys. If you and your child are competitive, this can become a fun game to see who can complete all of their goals each day. 

•  Set out clothes for the next morning with your child

Preparing for the morning the night before fosters skills related to time management and organization. It reduces stress, anxiety, and frustration during morning routines.

Begin by checking the next day’s weather with your child. Now, with smartphones and in-home devices such as Alexa and Google Home- this step couldn’t get any simpler. Once you have determined the weather, work with your child to put aside an outfit. If your child has a uniform, this is the time for them to ensure all of the parts are washed and accounted for. If your child does not have a uniform, this is their chance to put together a cohesive, dress-code and weather appropriate outfit that matches their personality. While they put aside their outfit, you also have the chance to ensure you have everything you need for the next morning, potentially putting a small load in the washer and dryer before bed or ironing a pair of slacks. Once each of your outfits are picked out, you can each place them on the back of the bedroom doors using a hook. 

•  Involve your child in cooking or meal preps

Cooking uses every EF skill there is. It fosters organizational, time management, working memory, and attention skills. Children must learn to use foresight and create grocery lists, gather and organize ingredients, time manage and prioritize what to cook when based on varying cook times, and attend tasks while cooking. Even better, it develops self-confidence in your child and a sense of accomplishment when they serve the meal to the family.  

Begin by scheduling one day a week that your child is responsible for making dinner. I encourage parents to have their child make dinner since it is a meal the entire family can enjoy together. Once the day has been scheduled, help your child select meals you know they can accomplish with minimal assistance. Encourage your child to do as much of the meal independently as possible. These do not have to be complicated meals. Spaghetti with meat sauce, club sandwiches, baked ziti, hotdogs, or hamburgers are all examples of simple meals children can create with minimal assistance.

 For more information about Executive Functioning, click here: https://www.understood.org/en/learning-attention-issues/child-learning-disabilities/executive-functioning-issues/3-areas-of-executive-function