Since December, I’ve been getting text messages from my students letting me know about their early and rolling admissions decisions. Mostly, they’re yes’s – we tend to prioritize the safety and target schools in the early application rounds. It’s an exciting message to get and a great opportunity to celebrate with my students who I know have worked so hard.
 
Some of the teenagers I work with aren’t quite as communicative – shocking, I know – so I stay in touch with their parents about what the student has heard so far. While I prefer to talk to my kids and get to send them applause hands emojis directly, chatting with mom and dad gives me the chance to make sure we’re all on the same page.
 
One of the most important things a parent can do in the college application process is be a guide for their kid’s feelings. It’s easy to downplay the significance of getting admitted to a safety school – we knew the answer was going to be yes! But every yes from a college is a big deal, even if we knew it was coming. And parents are best positioned to drive that point home.
 
When your kid mentions that they got an email from a college telling them that their admissions decision is in their portal, make a fuss about it. Gather the whole family together, pull out your phone, and get ready to snap a picture or a video of the big moment. If you see a (hopefully big) envelope come in the mail, present it with a little fanfare. When your student gets admitted somewhere, do some research so you can talk about the aspects of the campus or the local area or the programs that sound cool to you. Start planning a trip to visit the college, and when you’re on campus, help your kid see all the exciting potential in the classrooms and the dorms and on the quads.
 
If you respond to a college acceptance halfheartedly, your child will get the message that this is not worth being excited about. If you hear about a yes from one school and immediately mention the other schools that you’re more interested in hearing back from, your child will learn that some schools are good enough and some schools aren’t. But, if you can demonstrate your enthusiasm for every school that says yes to your kid, they will also feel that excitement.
 
They will start exploring the parts of the school that sound interesting to them. They will begin imagining themselves on that campus, with those friends. And if they’re genuinely excited about the places that have said yes to them, then the no’s won’t sting quite so much. Most of the advice for parents going through the college application process is about stepping back, but in this instance, you get to take the lead.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about informational interviews as a good first step toward finding interesting summer plans. Yesterday, I learned about another cool option for high school students from none other than my sister.  
 
I was chatting with one of my juniors about how she wanted to spend her summer break, and she was struggling to figure out her tricky schedule. She knew that both of her parents had individual vacations planned for her and her siblings, and she would be expected to spend time helping out at her grandmother’s on weekends. With a few different things already set in stone, she knew it would be hard to get a part-time job when she wasn’t very flexible. We started talking about community service opportunities, and she seemed to perk up at the idea of doing some volunteer work, but she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do.
 
When I got off my call, my sister, a recent political science grad from American University, mentioned that she had a possible volunteer idea for my student: political campaigns. While she was in high school, my sister had routinely volunteered to make phone calls for the Obama reelection campaign – before she could even vote! And the summer after her freshman year in college, she had volunteered extensively for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, eventually being named a fellow and working to train other volunteers.
 
Both of her experiences volunteering on these campaigns had been incredibly satisfying and offered her significant opportunities to dig into work she cared about and network with people in a field she eventually wanted to build a career in. And all she had to do was show up at the Oakland office and ask what she could do to help. The barrier to entry for volunteering on a political campaign is typically quite low. Usually, a half-hour of training is all you need before they set you up with a list of phone numbers to call or doors to knock on. 
 
Even if you don’t want to work in politics someday, volunteering for a political campaign is an exciting experience, where you’ll likely meet lots of other young, passionate people. With this November’s upcoming elections, there are likely plenty of offices looking for volunteers to help with the primary races, presidential campaigns, and senate campaigns. If you’re looking for something interesting and impactful – and flexible - you can do this summer, think about volunteering for a local or national candidate. They will be thrilled to have you. 

Whenever I tour a college, I always ask about a few things that are important to me and to the families I work with. If they haven’t mentioned it already, I ask about support services for students with learning differences and the availability of on-campus tutoring. As an ardent feminist, I ask about the systems in place to report sexual assault or harassment. And after my own experience considering a career in academia, I ask about the prevalence of adjunct professors on campus.
 
Adjunct professors are instructors “hired on a contractual, part-time basis as opposed to the traditional university model of full-time employment,” as explained by Concordia University in Portland. And this is important because, “adjunct faculty now make up the majority of instructors in higher education institutions nationwide.” According to a Forbes article, fully 70% of college faculty members were contingent employees in 2011.
 
On the positive side, adjunct professors can be experts in their fields who teach limited courses at a local university to share their unique professional expertise. Think Tyra Banks teaching a class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business on personal branding. Or former United States attorney, Preet Bharara, teaching the Elements of Criminal Justice at NYU School of Law. But on the negative side, there is typically a significant wage gap between contingent and tenured faculty, and adjuncts often receive little to no benefits from the institutions they teach for. But why should this matter to high school students?
 
Aside from the fundamental question of whether this is an ethical system, adjunct faculty are not given the necessary resources to provide a quality education to their students. Contingent faculty are often assigned classes at the last minute, meaning they don’t have the time to fully prepare for the class and they might be teaching a subject outside their area of expertise. Because of the low wages, they often teach classes at multiple institutions, stretching these instructors very thin and making them less available to their students. This can negatively impact the student’s experience in the class itself and also make things like attaining letters of recommendation more difficult down the line.
 
If this situation concerns you, I’d encourage you to start asking questions on your next college tour. The American Federation of Teachers suggests asking the following questions:

• How likely is it that a first- or second year student at your institution will be taught by full-time, permanent faculty members?
• What percentage of undergraduate classes and discussion sections are taught by part-time faculty and graduate assistants?
• How much do part-time faculty make per course at your institution?
• Are part-time faculty required to hold office hours? Do they get paid to do so, and are they provided suitable office space to meet with students?

 
If the student tour guide doesn’t know the answer, ask them to talk to their boss and follow up with you. This is a simple way to let colleges know what matters to students and families, and to advocate for adjunct instructors. 

​As regular readers of this blog know, my favorite thing to do is start projects early. So, of course, when my juniors and sophomores came back from winter break, we started talking about their summer plans. In my first year at Collegewise, I co-wrote our guide to summer planning, so this is one of my favorite topics to dive into with kids. The best part – and for some students, the worst part – is that there are no rules for how you should spend your summer. It’s a free square on the bingo card, which can be both liberating and stressful. So for students who are struggling to come up with summer plans they’re excited about, I’m suggesting informational interviews.
 
I’m obviously of the opinion that you don’t need to know what you want to do for the rest of your life when you’re 16 years old. So it might seem counterintuitive to tell students to take their time finding a career that excites them and also encourage them to conduct informational interviews. But I think one of the reasons students struggle to identify a career path that speaks to them is because they have such a small window of options to choose from.
 
Ask most kids what they want to do when they grow up, and they’ll probably tell you something you could find on a career card in The Game of Life: doctor, teacher, entertainer, artist, athlete, accountant, salesperson, computer consultant, police officer. But when I look at my friends and my parents’ friends, most of their jobs only connect tangentially to those professions. It wasn’t until I got to college, and more realistically, when I started working, that I could see the absolute plurality of professions available to me.
 
That’s where informational interviews come in. The UC Berkeley Career Center describes an informational interview as “an informal conversation you can have with someone working in an area of interest to you. It is an effective research tool and is best done after preliminary online research.  It is not a job interview, and the objective is not to find job openings.” Informational interviews are also a great way to practice communicating with strangers and scary adults, something you’ll have to do more and more as you get older.
 
So talk to a few of your parents’ friends or your dentist or the manager at your local Starbucks. Invite them out for coffee and ask them what their job entails, what they like about it, and what they would like to do less of. Ask them how they got into that field, what they majored in, and where they went to college (or if they went to college). If you’re intrigued, ask if you could shadow them for a day or if they need an intern in the office. If you’re not feeling excited yet, pick three more people and do it again. No matter what, you’ll start to see a much broader view of the things people do for work and why they chose those careers. And you might get really lucky and learn about a job that really engages you.