University of Alabama's Free App Week

The University of Alabama's Free App Week, running November 4-10, 2019.

Visit: FREE APP WEEK
Complete the form and receive a link directly to the application with their individual code beginning November 4. You have until 11:59 p.m. CT on November 10, to complete the application. 

Challenge Success Parent Education Event

We're excited to share the recording of our community-wide Parent Education evening with Lisa Damour that took place at Stanford University on September 27, 2019. Watch Dr. Damour along with Challenge Success Co-Founders Dr. Pope and Dr. Levine, and two students from our Challenge Success School Program team share tips and strategies on our evening theme: KIDS UNDER PRESSURE AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB2ACWlo0j4&feature=youtu.be

Class of 2020 - Weekend Updates

Seniors -

Yellow sheets for November 1 deadlines were due yesterday, Friday, October 18, 2019. Please turn them in to your counselor ASAP if you have not done so.

Yellow sheets for November 15 deadlines are due November 1. 

College Visits at WA 10/21 - 10/25

FAFSA Nights at NEIT
October 24, October 30, November 6
5:30 - 7:00pm
Register at NEIT.edu/FAFSAnights

University of Delaware Blue and Golden Open House
Saturday, November 9, 2019
For more information on UD and our application process, visit our website. 

Students can register for Blue and Golden here.

Lesley University Portfolio Days

MassBay Fall and Spring Open Houses

November 16, 2019 and May 2, 2020

9am - 12pm

Visit massbay.edu/openhouse for more information

Lesley University Open House
Sunday November 3
Sunday January 26
Visit lesley.edu/visit for more information

University of Maine Open House
Saturday November 16
Saturday April 25, 2020
Tours available Monday - Saturday
go.umaine.edu/visit or call 207.581.1561

McGill University Fall Open House
October 20, 2019
Register online to attend the event at: https://mcgillinmind.mcgill.ca

Skidmore Open House(s)
October 27 (Science/Math Open House)
November 11
November 23 (Theater Open House)
Register online skidmo.re/openhouse

Harvard Physics Circle is a free mentoring program, open to all students from the Greater Boston area of age 16 and above. In this program we expose students to challenging physics beyond the high-school curriculum, and prepare them for the “F=ma” exam, the first official exam en route to being part of the US physics Olympiad team. The mentoring is done by a superb group of Harvard and MIT physics students. We received excellent feedback from students who participated in the past, who enjoyed the mentoring process and learned a tremendous amount. One of our "veterans" received a gold medal in the International Physics Olympiad - a huge achievement.  For more information, visit: http://amir.seas.harvard.edu/boston-physics-circle. The Physics Circle runs every  Sunday, 11am-1pm at Harvard. (lunch provided too!). The room for the weekly meetings is Cruft 309, located at 19 Oxford Street in Cambridge.

Westford Parent Connection Book Discussion Group

2019 – 2020 Book Discussion Group

For the first time, the Westford Parent Connection is offering a parenting book discussion group. These discussions are open to all Westford residents. A limited number of copies of the books to be discussed will be available one month prior to the discussion dates.

All events will begin at 10:00 a.m. in the Mary Atwood Room at the J.V. Fletcher Library. For more information, contact Mary Anne Seraphin at mary.anne.seraphin@gmail.com.

The Westford Parent Connection is an independent, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that has been an integral part of the Westford community for nearly 20 years. https://www.westford.org/wpc/

OCTOBER 17, 2019 Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to The College Admissions Mania. By Frank Bruni. https://www.amazon.com/Where-You-Not-Who-Youll/dp/1455532681/

DECEMBER 12, 2019 Unselfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed In Our All-About-Me World. By Michele Borba. https://www.amazon.com/UnSelfie-Empathetic-Succeed-All-About-MeWorld/dp/1501110071/

FEBRUARY 27, 2020 The Opposite Of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, And Smart About Money. By Ron Lieber https://www.amazon.com/Opposite-Spoiled-Raising-GroundedGenerous/dp/0062247026/

APRIL 2, 2020 The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies To Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind. Dr. Daniel Siegel. https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Brain-Child-Revolutionary-StrategiesDeveloping/dp/0553386697/

Class of 2020 - Thursday Updates

Seniors: If you have decided to apply early with a November 1 deadline, you must notify your counselor ASAP (the deadline was September 24) and complete your senior meeting by October 16.

If you have decided to apply early with a November 15 deadline, you must notify your counselor by October 10 and complete your senior meeting by October 22

YELLOW SHEETS
If your deadline is October 15, turn in yellow sheets ASAP (deadline was October 1)
If your deadline is November 1, turn in yellow sheets by October 18

UPCOMING COLLEGE VISITS

COLLEGE INFORMATION SESSIONS/OPEN HOUSES

Northern Essex Community College 

Haverhill campus

Tuesday, October 1^st

6:00PM-8:00 PM

Sports and Fitness Center (D Building)

https://www.neacac.org/fall-college-fairs-2019

Binghamton University Fall Open House

Sunday, Oct. 20

https://www.binghamton.edu/admissions/visit/fall-open-house-agenda.html

Bridgton Academy Open House

October 14 or November 11

To register, visit bridgtonacademy.org/events

Concordia University Open House & Portfolio Day

Saturday October 19

Find out more at concordia.ca/openhouse

James Madison University Information Sessions

Saturday October 19

2-4pm

Boston Marriott Newton

2345 Commonwealth Avenue

Newton, MA 02459

Sunday October 20

2-4pm

Hartford Marriott Farmington

15 Farm Springs Rd.

Farmington, CT 06032

Lynn University Open House

October 12 and December 7

Register online at lynn.edu/visit

University of Massachusetts Boston

Saturday, October 19th

Students can learn more and register online at www.umb.edu/openhouse.

Sacred Heart University Fall Open House

Monday October 14 and Sunday November 24

To register visit sacredheart.edu/visitplanner

University of Virginia School of Architecture Tours

Information Sessions + Tours
Friday, October 18Friday, November 15

29th Annual New England Service Academy Night, hosted by Norwich University!

There will be a brief overview of the Academy appointment process,  ROTC scholarship applications, and Senior and Junior Military Colleges.  Representatives will also be available to meet one-on-one to answer all of your questions.

Wednesday, November 6th 2019

Danversport Yacht Club

161 Elliott Street

Danvers, MA 01923

SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES

If you have a girl getting ready to head to college, here is the ultimate list of scholarships for women and girls.https://thescholarshipsystem.com/blog-for-students-families/the-ultimate-list-of-scholarships-for-women-and-girls/?sfns=mo

Article - Three Fears About Applying To College and How To Address Them

Three Fears About Applying To College and How To Address Them

Posted September 13, 2019 | by Thomas Golden, Ph.D. | Posted in Ideas that Challenge

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Our guest blogger, Thomas Golden, Ph.D., is an educational consultant and former university admissions officer.

2019 might well go down in history as the year college admissions jumped the shark. Over the last two decades, the hype and intensity surrounding university admissions in the United States has grown slowly, a cheating scandal in Atlanta here, an improper influence over the University of Illinois admissions process there. This year, the great scriptwriters in the sky turned up the drama with news stories surrounding the Varsity Blues Scandal, the multiple instances of poor parent behavior at a top private school in Washington, D.C., and several instances of standardized testing fraud, all within five months.

These high profile examples of deplorable behavior, all executed with the intent of gaming a coveted spot at a tiny cross-section of American colleges, underscore the perceived high stakes of college admissions and the dysfunctional side effects they introduce into our culture. Over my 20 years in selective admissions at both Purdue and Vanderbilt Universities, I observed the toxic achievement culture fueled by the daydreams of elite higher education. I also witnessed the lethargic response from the broader higher education admissions community, which in my view seemed to more or less shrug off the hysteria as regrettable, but ultimately good for business.

What we now know, of course, is that this collective indifference to the intensifying admissions hype cycles has created a vacuum in which our young people must sift through all the marketing and pressure to perform with few resources to consult, except for all their “friends” in the comparison echo chamber of social media. The cemented pattern for many achievement-oriented high schoolers is: school, practice, extracurriculars, homework, eat, sleep, repeat. It is not surprising then that a New York University study found that nearly half of high achieving high school students reported feeling a great deal of stress on a daily basis, what clinicians call chronic stress. A further 26% of students demonstrated symptoms consistent with clinically significant depression.

I see it and hear it now first-hand from the students I work with in my educational consulting practice. Inspired by the staff and faculty at Challenge Success, we built a program around evidence-based techniques to address the stress and pressure of the modern college search by re-writing the dominant cultural script about the college search. Our main message is this:  the college search is NOT about the college, it is about the search. It is about the student taking stock of himself or herself and starting down the path of adult-decision making, in all its rewards and messiness.  

This is not to say that stress, and sometimes overwhelming fear, is completely avoidable for the college seeking student. As with any major life change, a baseline of anxiety is to be expected. It is this vague dread that students describe as lurking in the vicinity of the college search that we want to explore.

So, let’s address the looming and often shapeless nature of college anxiety. Let’s be precise and nuanced in addressing the nature of admissions fear. 

In spite of overwhelming evidence that most students experience great success in the college search, there is still considerable anxiety and fear. Consider this: the average college admits approximately two thirds of its applicants, and only 20% of all colleges admit less than half of applicants. The vast bulk of students pursuing higher education today, are attending colleges and universities that admit large majorities of applicants. What’s more, a national survey found that 55% of first-time college students are attending their first-choice college. Why then, in an educational environment so full of diverse options, are young people so fearful of this next step they are facing? And how can we begin to recreate the negative environment that surrounds them?  

Let’s tackle the top three fears we normally hear from students:

1. “I won’t get into the college I want to attend.”

What if I told you a story about a boy with an unusually clear dream to bring his particular style of art into the world for everyone to see?  He was so obsessed with his craft, that he would fake illnesses so that he could stay home from school and work on his art. When it came time to apply to college, he put in his application to one of the top schools for the study of this particular art form. He was turned down, not once but three times. Despondent, he took up a job as a gofer at a local studio and enrolled in classes at a local state college. 

This would likely sum up the totality of this fear for most young people. But what if I told you that this young man was none other than Steven Allan Spielberg, the film icon, and eventual trustee of the college that thrice rejected him, the University of Southern California.

Warren Buffett was denied to Harvard Business School. I am going to just leave that right there for a second. To Harvard Business School. Warren Buffett. Barack Obama (denied to Swarthmore), Tina Fey (denied to Princeton), Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin (denied to M.I.T.), Tom Hanks (denied to M.I.T. and also Villanova for good measure) and hundreds more cultural and industrial luminaries were all turned away by various admissions committees. In many cases, being turned away from one path of ambition served as an invitation to a new direction. Tom Brokaw (who was denied admission to Harvard) has noted that “the initial stumble was critical in getting me launched.”

I get it. Socially, the college search is a highly visible process, with everyone seemingly in on the culturally acceptable two-part question that every senior in America gets asked:  “Where are you going to college and what do you want to major in?” (more on that later). I call these the family reunion questions. If you dare to answer the first part of that question, it feels as if you are putting yourself out there, because what if you don’t get in? Everyone will know and how awful would that be? In my dissertation research, we found that over 58% of high school juniors indicated that not getting into their top choice college was a major source of stress in their college search. 

The headwater of this fear is a dysfunctional belief I call the “true love college,” in which young people are advised to visit various college campuses and to listen closely to their hearts as inevitably one of them will whisper, like the cornfields to Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams. A lone sunbeam will illuminate their path as various woodland creatures gather around their feet and birds to their shoulder. And no, there will be no rain this day, but if it must, it rains Skittles.

It is my experience that buying into this myth is often troubling for young people. When kids fixate on one college, they lend their fate to that college, their future held in escrow by an admissions committee which is, I can confidently say, made up of people. Wonderful, hard-working, but most certainly, human people, just as full of flaws and mistakes as anyone else. Just ask the admissions committee who denied Warren Buffett. 

So how do we rewrite this dysfunctional script? With cheeseburgers, of course.

Colleges are like cheeseburgers. You can find them all over the place, and there’s a lot of core similarities to them, but the magic is in the diversity. The bun, the burger, the cheese, the toppings – oh so many toppings. There are regional varieties, variations to suit all kinds of tastes and needs from Gluten-free, vegan, and vegetarian options; it’s amazing. And yes, there are those who scream loudly about some notion of a “classic cheeseburger,” or perhaps argue that a cheeseburger isn’t truly great unless it costs an absurd amount of money, but we know better. The beauty is in knowing what kind of cheeseburger you like and being unapologetic about that. And if a college won’t serve you their brand of cheeseburger, channel your inner Spielberg and Obama and go find a cheeseburger at another place that will appreciate you. It’s all delicious.

2. “All my friends have their majors picked out and I don’t have a clue.”

The second half of the “family reunion questions” is a doozy. “What do you want to major in,” or its cousin, which shows up when you have picked a major, “What do you want to do with that?” are seemingly innocent enough questions. But they do introduce a degree of stress into the mixture of anxieties that surround the college search. Again, going back to my dissertation research:  49% of high school juniors identified this stressor as a major source of anxiety as it related to their college search. While I certainly acknowledge that there is some benefit for a young person to be encouraged to articulate their future plans (as well as they know them at the time), I am concerned with the rigidity of the small box into which the young person must insert their answers.

The challenge is that we, the individuals usually asking, “what do you want to major in?” represent a generation of professionals steeped in a more linear view of career preparedness with a more pronounced division between majors and professions. The current generation does not see a career this way. Three-quarters of college graduates do not end up working in their major five years post-graduation. The notion of a career is more fluid than it has ever been with today’s worker changing jobs 12 times on average.

The rewrite of this dysfunctional belief: Instead of asking “What do I want to major in?” ask “What do I want to learn how to do?”  Do you want to learn how to start a business, write compelling research, advocate for a cause you truly believe in, fluently speak three languages, or even, how can you be successful while also enjoying your life?  These are the questions that are much more meaningful and lasting.

3. “I won’t pick the right college.”

This fear is a derivative of the aforementioned “true love college,” except this belief also rolls notions of future success into the stress burrito. “If I pick the wrong college, I won’t be able to get the job I want, and thus will live a life of crime and degradation, possibly in a van down by the river . . . yada, yada.”  This fear drives the college-seeking student and family to rankings magazines and material from the “best colleges” section of the bookstore, hoping that enrolling in a particular college will facilitate a better career and life. On campus tours, this shows up in the form of questions like, “What percent of graduates find employment, or grad school, or simply avoid jail time within 6 months?”  At the heart of this is the notion that one college can significantly prepare you better for a career than another, a concept that is thematic to most university admissions marketing that floods mailboxes (I should know, I did that for two decades). Marketing like this hinges on two important and interlocking variables: value and scarcity. 

The messaging is simple, if not flawed:  

1. College is a valuable and even essential gateway to financial security and upward social mobility, and,
2. Access to the best colleges is getting scarcer and scarcer

You see, if the marketing is to work, the resources needed to achieve this future success must be perceived as scarce. As a former university marketer, my job was to convince prospective students and families that paying my college’s tuition was worth it; it was the best and most unique cheeseburger in the world. Could they get just as good of a cheeseburger, errr education, perhaps with a different experience and toppings, just down the street for one-third of the price?  Yes. However, for my particular cheeseburgers to keep selling, there had to be a perceived scarcity in access to future success, or said another way, “Our college has something the other places don’t, and because of that, our students outperform those other places and get better jobs.”

The problem, of course, is that there is scant evidence that one 4-year college dramatically outperforms another 4-year college in career success and life satisfaction outcomes, when variables known to predict such outcomes are controlled. A famous example of this is the study by Stacy Berg Dale of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Princeton economist Alan Krueger in which they found that students who were admitted to highly selective and top-ranked universities, but who attended less selective colleges were just as successful and happy as those were attended the choosier schools. Said another way, it’s not about the college, it’s about the student. Or, as Challenge Success shared in their white paper on healthy college admissions, A “Fit” Over Rankings, what you do in college matters more than where you go.

The rewrite of this dysfunctional belief: I have studied the college search enough to know that what college you attend simply does not matter as much as we are all lead to believe it does. No amount of marketing can change this. You know what does matter? You, the student. Your character, integrity, love for yourself and those around you, and your sheer unwillingness to go away. No college can give you this nor take it away. 

So let’s resolve to journey to the center of the college anxiety that is around us and describe it in specific and nuanced terms. When we do, we will find out that it’s just fear being afraid of itself. The future is not something to fear and access to success is not a scarce resource. There are an abundance of options all around us. Keep that in mind the next time you bite into your favorite cheeseburger.

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Thomas C. Golden, Ph.D., is the Founder and Principal of Golden Educational Consulting which seeks to inspire young people to discover what inspires them by teaching families how to prepare their kids for the challenges of the college search. Known simply as Dr. Thom to his clients and friends, he spent more than 20 years in selective admissions at some of the top universities in the world, leading recruitment and admissions evaluations at Purdue and Vanderbilt Universities. He can be reached at thom@doctorthom.com and at doctorthom.com